


All Of Neptune's Children Flock Home

by petpluto



Series: As The Planets Align [5]
Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Mystery, Returning Home, Romance, School Reunion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2014-04-04
Packaged: 2017-12-27 04:57:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/974598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/petpluto/pseuds/petpluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After getting a desperate call from Logan, Veronica is back in Neptune, California to solve a murder mystery, clear her old boyfriend's name, and maybe attend her high school reunion. If there's time and if Wallace and Mac get their way. In order to do all of that, she's going to need the help of old friends, old clients, and the very people she's been avoiding for as long as she's ignored Neptune itself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to post this until I was done with it. But it has become a sprawling epic, and the only thing I have written down completely is Veronica's emotional journey. It meshes some of what we know about the basic plot of the Veronica Mars movie with my own 'original' spin on how I imagine everything going down.
> 
> My plan is to get this done before the movie premieres, so this is going to take precedence over my other WIPs. The good news is, I have an actual plan and a finite idea. The bad news is, this is my first time plotting one major mystery a couple minor ones. YAY!
> 
>  
> 
> _**DISCLAIMER:** I'm only doing this because I can't wait for the official Veronica Mars movie to come out. So, no, I have no affiliation in any way with Veronica Mars, other than that ten dollars I donated to the kickstarter campaign. _

Neptune, California, Veronica thinks as she wheels her suitcase across the terminal. Where there’s an airport even though the town’s size alone wouldn’t be able to support it, if not for the millionaires and billionaires who demanded it. Home not-so-sweet home.

She wanders aimlessly around for a little bit. It’s a little bit because she doesn’t want to be in this town, and definitely not for this reason. Definitely not because Logan managed to get himself pinched for murder. But it’s also a little bit because the only person waiting on her is in a jail cell. After abandoning her sedate and steady existence, after booking a flight and kissing the boyfriend goodbye without explaining why she had to go, why she was leaving him behind, it felt like too much of a capitulation to tell anyone else she was coming back after she’d fought so long and so hard to not. So, she didn’t get around to calling anyone to pick her up. Didn’t tell her father she was coming to town. Didn’t pester Wallace for a ride. Didn’t text Mac. And she definitely didn’t call Weevil.

But that doesn’t stop him from standing right in front of her as she turns the corner.

She pauses when she sees him, hits herself in the back of the legs with her rolling suitcase. Curses, but low. He’s just far enough away that he shouldn’t hear, and it looks like he’s been entranced by a Cinnabun, so she thinks she might be able to creep back the way she came without him noticing. But before she can sneak off, he turns around and grins at her, wide and bright and Weevil.

“The prodigal child returns,” he calls out, and she grimaces as heads turn toward her. Weevil seems to be enjoying the attention he’s drawn to them as he saunters over, though, so she lets him have this little victory before she eyes him up and down.

He looks good. Traded his baggy jeans for ones that are just tight enough to highlight the fact that he’s a really very in shape, very good looking guy from the waist down. And, she thinks, from the waist up too. When she gets to his eyes, his eyebrows shoot up. “See something you like?”

“Hardly,” she scoffs. “More like trying to figure out what the hell you’re doing here, because it can’t be for me. I didn’t call you to tell you when I was getting in.”

“You told the boss man you were going to get here by morning. I might not be the licensed PI out of the two of us, but even I can look at flight schedules and put together the pieces, Vee.” He grins at her disbelief fondly, grins at her fondly, and she forgets why she didn’t want to know about him for nine years.

“Weevil -”

“It’s Eli now,” he tells her, and she flushes.

“Fine,” she tells him, crossing her arms. “Well, it’s Veronica now.”

His grin smooths out, and he pulls her to him. “Give me some love, chica. It’s been too long since I’ve seen you.”

She lets him fold her into his embrace, breathes in the smell of Weevil for the first time in a long time. Coffee and leather and the thing that was always just distinctly him invades her nose, and she tears up. Neptune doesn’t feel like home, but Weevil and his arms and his scent do. 

“It’s good to be back,” she tells him, and when he snorts, it’s obvious that he thinks she means back in Neptune instead of back with him. “I missed you.”

“Yeah?” He releases her and grabs for her bag with one hand as he rubs his head with the other. “Good to hear. Because I thought we were tight, but then you just up and vanished on me.”

“It wasn’t you,” she tells him as he leads her out, into the world. Into Neptune proper. “I just couldn’t stay.”

“Yeah. I get you.” The sad thing is, he probably does. He probably knows why she left him behind, how she didn’t want - couldn’t have - the temptation of the world he ran with. He probably knows she sacrificed his friendship on the altar of normality. 

She smiles sadly at him, and wraps her arms around herself. “Yeah.”

“After you left, I got on the real straight and narrow,” he tells her casually. “Got arrested just the once more before your dad hooked me up with another job, at his mechanic’s. I think he called in a favor or something. You have anything to do with that?”

She ducks her head down. It hurts to remember, her father calling her, telling her “Eli’s been caught with the last card machine”, and feeling the bottom drop out of her stomach. It hurts to remember telling him she wasn’t coming back, to not tell Weevil she knew. To ask her father to help him out, just this once more, please, and never pass along any information - good or bad - again.

“I may have requested one last get out of jail free card,” she tells him, and he reaches out and wraps his free arm around her shoulder.

“I was pissed as hell at you, that you didn’t come back. Sheriff told me you didn’t want to know nothing about me, so he wasn’t even going to pass my message to you on. And then, the doors just opened and I was working with my tools at a place that didn’t double as a chop shop. And it hit me: Sheriff likes me fine, yeah, but only one Mars would stick her neck out that far for me. So, thanks.” He shrugs. “I do get it, you know. Because I probably would have kept wanting to do all sorts of illegal shit if you were around to do it for, or to get me out when it came down to it. Once you were gone-gone, man, it was a wake up.”

She turns away from him, just for a second, and catches a glimpse of something shiny on a finger of the hand gripping her shoulder. “Eli Navarro, did some woman make you an honest man?”

It does a funny little thing to her stomach when he grins bashfully at her. “Yeah. I, uh, I wanted to tell you. Was gonna make you my best man, you know, if I tracked you down. Found an address for you and everything, sent you an invite through the USPS. Guess it never got to you.”

“I moved around a lot,” she offers. “I didn’t get it. I would have come, if I had.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re here now, aren’t you?”

She leans into him again, presses her side against his, and sighs. Because this is it. She’s home.

He leads her to a car, his car, and she stares down at it in confusion. “What is this?”

“This,” he says proudly, “is my baby. A 1967 Pontiac GTO. Rebuilt it from the rust up. It was my first major project for me, you know. Something I could keep. Call my own.”

She nods wordlessly, and continues to gape at it as Weevil - Eli - puts her suitcase in the back.

“You gonna get in it, or are you just gonna eye fuck it all day?”

“Both?” she answers. “It’s you, Weevil. It’s you as a car.”

He leans onto the roof and grins at her again. “And what are you driving these days, Miss Daisy?”

“I’m a New Yorker, now. My ride is the 6 train.” She thinks about her apartment on Bleecker, how she felt when she first saw it. How she felt giving up her wheels and letting someone else be in charge of getting her to her destination. How it’s still a process. She smiles at him. “It’s an exercise in experiencing a loss of control, most days.”

What’s depressing is, she’s not joking. He smirks, and opens the door for her. “You never did do too well when you weren’t the one behind the wheel.”

She scowls at him, and climbs in.

It’s strange how quickly she falls into old patterns. She wants to hate it, how she thought she was comfortable in her skin until she came home and slid into this car next to this guy, and her entire being exhaled in a way it hasn’t in years. She wants to hate how she knows she was happy, is happy, in New York, but Neptune - Neptune is still where she is Veronica Mars. 

“How did you and Logan hook up, anyway?” It’s the question that has been nestled on the tip of her tongue since Logan dismissed her the night before. It kept her up, tossing and turning, before she finally had to just get out of bed and go for a run, and then pack, and then write out a list of people to ask Logan about, and then call a cab company instead of just waiting and hailing one outside of her apartment. It’s the question she refused to give voice to, when it was only Daniel asking her about why she was wound so tight.

Weevil glances over at her, and she watches his eyes crinkle. “It bother you?”

“Why would it?”

“Because.” He turns to her completely after hitting a red light. “You’re not behind the wheel.”

She huffs, and turns away from him, pretends she can’t hear him laughing at her. “Light’s green.”

Weevil taps the gas, and then tells her, “I don’t know what your dad told you, about Echolls.” 

She knows he’s waiting, but she doesn’t want to say it. She doesn’t want to tell him that she blacklisted Logan too, for reasons both the same and entirely different from his own purging. 

“Yeah, I guess I should have figured that,” he mutters. “He was in a bad place, after you were gone. I think he figured, whatever it was that kept drawing the two of you together would keep working it’s magic. And when you vamoosed, it kicked him in the teeth. But me, I had that one moment where you stepped in. So, I decided to pass it along.”

She draws in a shuddering breath, because she doesn’t need Weevil to tell her what she already knows about how bad Logan can - could - get. She doesn’t want Weevil to go any further.

“I told him that it wasn’t us, and it wasn’t on us that you couldn’t stay. I told him that you were a bitch, and he punched me, hard, and we fought. And then we drank. And then he’d call me when he’d gotten himself in some shit, or I’d call him when I figured he needed to get drunk and beat the shit out with someone who wasn’t going to hold a grudge. And then one day, I’m working at the garage, fixing up my baby,” he tells her as he runs his hand over the dash, “and I get this call. And it’s Echolls, looking for a guy Friday. He figured I was probably up for it. So, there it is.”

“And now you’re picking me up at the airport for him.”

Weevil laughs, and she shares in the ridiculousness of the moment. “Yeah. We’re not, you know, best friends or anything. But we’re the two who were left.”

It cuts her, deep, what that means. They were the two who remember Lilly. They’re the two who remembered her. Not as everyone else in this town did, but as she was. She hopes, anyway. 

The station comes into view, and her body tightens. Weevil pulls into a space. Shuts off the car. And turns to her. “Listen, Vee, you’re still my girl. But he’s someone to me now, too. Got me?”

“Yeah.” She sits and stares ahead at the building. 

“You know,” she confides in him, “I don’t know what I was more scared of, a Neptune that was exactly the same as I left it or one where everyone moved on.”

He hugs her again, and the Weevil of her memory isn’t this tactile. She can’t figure out if she pegged him wrong, or if this is a new side of him she’s missed out on for the last nine years. “Vee, we grew up. But we didn’t move on. At least, not me. And not him. You’re still someone I’m glad to know. You’re still someone I love.”

“You don’t even know me anymore,” she weakly protests, and he laughs at her outright.

“You telling me you don’t love me?” She shakes her head. “So, what’s to stop me from loving you? And I know you, Veronica Mars. You hopped a plane because a guy told you he needed you. There’s nothing more you than that.”

“What’s his bail?”

“He doesn’t have one set yet.” She watches him shift, and for the first time Weevil looks uncomfortable. “Listen, Vee, I don’t know what you know about the town any more.”

“Assume I’m Sergeant Schultz here.”

He laughs. “Alright, well, there’s a new Lamb in charge - Dan Lamb, and he’s about as big a dick as the original. And he feels about the same way toward Logan, and me, so there’s that.”

“What you’re telling me is that Logan’s not getting bail until he has to.”

“Yeah. On the plus side, I’m going to be waiting to drive your ass all around town, because you don’t have a car yet.”

Veronica laughs. “Oh, great.”

~~~

The first person she sees when she and Weevil walk into the station is Sacks, and for a hot minute she feels bad for him. But instead of showing it, she decides to go the time tested route instead, greeting him with, “Always a deputy, never a sheriff, huh, Sacks? Is it as bad as always being a bridesmaid, never a bride?”

Weevil snickers behind her, and Sacks smiles wide. Which throws off Veronica’s whole game. “Hey, Veronica! Didn’t know you were back in town.”

“Yeah,” she tells him a bit awkwardly. “I just got back. Literally. Weevil - Eli - picked me up from the airport.” She fiddles a bit and then asks the almost requisite follow up of, “And how have you been?”

“Same old, same old. You know how it is.”

“Right.” Sacks watches her benignly, and she rocks back on her heels. “So, if the sheriff in?”

“Uh, yeah. He is.” Sacks continues sitting, and Veronica nods.

“Can I see him?”

“I don’t know why you would want to do that,” Sacks tells her. “You didn’t really get along with the last one. Or, the last one named Lamb, for that matter.”

“Yeah, but I have some pressing business, so if I could just -”

“Oh, okay,” he says. “I’ll go let him know he has visiters.”

And as he leaves to do that, Veronica twists back to Weevil. “He hasn’t really changed at all.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s kind of sad, really.”

“Yeah, it kind of is,” Weevil agrees.

“You can head on back. You remember where the office is?”

“Pretty sure I do. Thanks Sacks.”

“Yeah,” the perpetual deputy answers. “Good seeing you.”

“Yeah, you too,” she says, and makes a face and Weevil.

“You were more popular than you thought,” he whispers to her, and she fake punches his arm.

“Don’t you ever say that. I always thought everyone loved me.”

He stops in front of the door, and tells her, “Here we go.”

“Away we go,” she echoes, and knocks as they enter.

Dan Lamb looks like a seedier, smarmier, version of his brother, and his lips turn back in a familiar sneer when he sees Weevil.

“Mr. Navarro. I’m pretty sure I told you yesterday that your boss wasn’t getting out of the slammer until a judge orders me to let him out. So, unless you’re going to tell me something that has you sharing a cell with him - and oh please let it be that - I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

She glances at Weevil in consternation, and he grins reassuringly back at her. “Nope. Just giving my friend here a ride. She’d like to see Logan.”

His eyes creep over her, starting from her legs and traveling on up, and Weevil tenses alongside her before not so casually slipping a bit in front of her. 

“Well, hello. And who might you be?”

“Veronica Mars,” she tells him, just to see if the other Lamb passed on any tidbits. Judging by how quickly Dan goes from looking accommodating to looking surly, she thinks he had. “I’m Mr. Echolls’ private investigator. Can I see my client?”

“Didn’t think you’d ever be coming back,” this new Lamb grunts.

She raises her eyebrows, content to play this role. “Didn’t think you knew me in any way to have an opinion on that. So I guess we were both wrong. My client?”

“Don did always say you were a smart mouth,” he says, reaching for her bag.

She hands it off to Weevil, just out of belligerence. “Is that all he said about my mouth?” she asks before she walks through the door. A little bit of sass, she thinks, before she meets with the king of it himself. Walks down into the station’s underbelly, body on full alert.

“There she is,” Logan calls out from the darkness of his cell. “Riding in to save the day, like the heroes of old.”

“More like riding in to save your ass,” she retorts, and tries not to stare at him straight on as he waltzes out of the shadows and leans against the bars. Tries desperately not to think about asses at all. Veronica is almost sure he doesn’t mean it seductively, but several different long dormant fantasies are starting to surface and she doesn’t need to give them any more ammunition.

“That’s kind of like saving the day, right? I mean, I am now one of the premiere business men in this town. Saving me is basically doing your civic duty.” He bares his teeth in an approximation of a smile, and Veronica sees the rage shining through. Like Logan of old, she allows.

“It’s amazing how your ego hasn’t decreased even one iota since I’ve been gone,” she tells him dryly. “You’re a premiere business man now?”

She watches as his smile falters, as insecurity battles fury for dominance. “Uh, yeah. I thought you would know. With your tendency to, you know, stalk people.”

“I haven’t looked you up since I left,” she tells him softly, and watches him reel back from that. Physically, because Logan is nothing if not dramatic, and it comforts her that hasn’t changed. She thinks she might know what he’s thinking, that not looking him up means something different than it actually does. 

“Have to say,” he mutters to the floor, “I didn’t see that one coming. Kind of explains how you didn’t know about Weevil’s employment, though.”

She bites back a question about why he still gets to call Weevil ‘Weevil’, and shrugs. “Yeah, well, clean break.”

“From everyone?”

Leaning back onto the table, she nods. “Mostly. I mean, I obviously still talk to my dad, and still see him. Am still practically co-dependent, even though a continent separates us. And Wallace, and Mac. But no one else.”

“There weren’t really a lot of other people to start,” Logan returns, and she can’t argue with that. So she doesn’t.

“You want to tell me what happened?”

“Met a girl, fell in love,” he pauses, as if he’s waiting for some reaction. She refuses to give him one. “That girl disappeared on me, so I did some drugs, got in some fights, drank, heavily, and then straightened out my life. Started actually, what was it, reaching my potential. Mac helped me put together my portfolio and introduced me to some other computer geniuses who decided to stay local, and I used my considerable funds to do some charity work. Rebuilt a community pool. Agitated for more affordable kindercare and other after school activities for low income kids. Developed a panel of like-minded businessmen and businessmen who I could bully into being like-minded, and then met a woman. A pop star. She was supposed to be an ambassador. A sexy face for a planned expansion beyond city lines. And she was - well, attractive, and I’m, well - and we started dating. And now she’s dead.”

“Thanks for the quick and dirty,” she drawls, “but I’m going to need more details about the pop star. Name, age, birth place, what your relationship was like, what her friends were like, where you two went most often, and where you were when she was killed.”

“You don’t know her name?”

“I got your call and immediately started working on getting home, so no, I don’t know her name.”

“She’s an up and coming pop star. You should have heard her hit on the radio,” Logan answers incredulously, and Veronica shrugs at him.

“I don’t listen to the radio.” No radio, no cable television, no celebrity news of any kind.

“What kind of person doesn’t listen to the radio?”

“The kind who has a subscription to Spotify and is able to curate her own playlists without having some nebulous person dictate what she listens to and when,” she answers, crossing her arms in front of her. “Now, name?”

“Her real name is Katherine. Boscove. Her stage name is Katrina Bliss.”

“Bliss?” 

“It’s sexier than Boscove.”

“I suppose it is,” she tells him. 

He sighs. “She was 20, her birth place was somewhere in Idaho or Indiana or Iowa, one of those ‘I’ states, and I didn’t meet a lot of her friends. I spent some time with her crew, and they’re all the usual types. You remember - they’re basically all Trinas. Or that woman who was my mom’s BFF for years before she was caught in a compromising position with dear old Aaron.”

“I forgot about that woman,” she murmurs, and Logan nods. 

“I wish I could. Anyway. Kat - she liked to be seen. Photographed. Whatever. We’d go out to eat a lot. Meet up, have a meal, and then she would go off to work on her record or promotion work. We hit a couple of red carpets, and talked about seeing that new movie, the one about the end of the world?”

“There are like, ten of those out right now,” she tells him, and he laughs.

“Right, of course. Anyway, we never got around to doing that. It was nice. Simple. Sweet. She liked me, and I liked her. We weren’t at the stage yet where we were exposing our deep dark secrets,” he tells her meaningfully, “but it was - there might have been something there.”

“What about that night?” she asks, beating down the little jump her stomach did in reaction to Logan talking about another girl, hating that her stomach was still stuck at sixteen when the rest of her is considerably older. And less inclined to be affected by Logan’s - by Logan.

“She came over for a little bit. I left, and when I came back, I found her. So, I called 911 and was promptly arrested and brought here, where cell B is just not reaching the standards of accommodation it used to. And then I called you.”

She starts to nod, and stops. “Wait - if she came over to your place, why did you leave her there?”

He glares, and then fiddles with his fingers. She waits him out, just watching, until he breaks. Like she knew he would.

“We fought,” he tells her, reluctantly, and she finds herself leaning forward.

“About what?” He glares at her, and she shrugs. “I need to know, Logan. If you don’t tell me, I don’t have anywhere to look.”

“It was - she thinks - she thought - I flirt too much. With people who aren’t her.”

Her eyebrow goes up. “You probably do.”

“You never complained.”

She looks at him, this angry man who came out of the sullen and angry boy she knew. She looks at him, and then down at her hands. “Yeah, I didn’t. But I felt it.”

“Then why didn’t you - you know what, nevermind. It doesn’t matter. What matters is Kat thought that, I stormed out, and then when I came back, she was dead.” She nods at him and he leans back.

“Do you remember the time? When you stormed out?”

Logan fidgets. “Had to be after six thirty. But before Jeopardy, because that was playing when I got to the gym.”

She snickers at him watching the quiz show, and he huffs in response.

“Laugh all you want, but it’s educational, and it distracts from the actual monotony of gym life. And if I make goal or answer enough questions, I treat myself to an ice cream.”

“Amy’s?” she asks, a rush of nostalgia overtaking her.

He grins at her, and she sees phantom versions of them getting ice cream together, him buying her the kinds that would turn her tongue and lips blue while he got a ‘grown up’ flavor.

“Yeah. Amy’s.”

“So, between 6:30 and 7, then.”

“Yeah.”

“That should be enough to go on, at least for now,” she tells him flatly. “Try to not go too stir crazy in here.

Logan snorts. “Well, they can’t put my dad in as my cell mate, so I’m already heads and shoulders above my worst visit.”

“I’ll fill you in, if I find anything.”

He waves her away, and Veronica stands to leave. For some reason, she feels the need to defend this girl she doesn’t even know. So, she tells him, in a kind of non sequitur, “I didn’t bring it up because I was afraid you’d just leave. Like you did to her. But, yeah, it bothered me. Every time you’d step away from me when a pretty girl walked by, every time a girl called me your friend and you didn’t correct them, it bothered me.” She looks straight at him. “I know it’s who you are, and I know you like what you get out of it, but it was just another piece of intel letting me know you weren’t in it for the long haul. It wasn’t out of jealousy. Not entirely, I mean. It was just - I knew you were looking for something better.”

It’s a dull ache, telling him that, admitting that he wasn’t the only one who wasn’t exactly secure in their relationship. It used to be a sharper pain, a squeezing of the chest. It used to be that she worried over it. When he would leave. When he would find someone who was actually fun, or less cynical, or more experienced - in bed and other places. Someone who wouldn’t shut down. Someone who could laugh. When he did leave, it had hurt so badly she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to feel anything else but pain. And when she came to him to make it work, she had left before he could. Because he was still the guy who didn’t like her job and who would be able to look at the girl he’d slept with weeks before with nothing more than disinterest, and she was still the girl who had to solve the case in order to breathe and who needed to know who he’d been with when. Who was terrified at the idea he could hide the truth from her as easily as she could ferret it out from anyone else.

But now, as she finally looks at him head on, she doesn’t have to worry about any of that. Before, she was afraid he’d be the one to walk away, so she kept quiet. But it’s been years, and they aren’t together. He found other women to fit into his life, and she’s had other boyfriends. Now, it’s just something she can say, without worry. When this is done, she can leave again. When this is done and he walks away, it won’t be from them. It’ll just be because their reason for being around each other is gone, and they can get on with their regularly scheduled existences.

He stares back, and his eyes are as open as they were when they were nineteen, and she hates that she still envies him that openness. 

“Veronica,” his voice creaks, and she ducks down to look at the floor. “When I was with you, I wasn’t looking for anyone else. And there couldn’t have been anyone better. You were the only person I saw.”

Tears she never let fall over this burn at the back of her eyeballs, and she beats them back. “It felt like you were. And, really, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Sure, it does,” he argues, because he always has to argue with her. He can’t ever let her be right. “It matters a lot. If we’d talked about this crap, we would have -”

“Broken up anyway, because we were nineteen years old, Logan. Something else would have happened. And you were who you were and I was who I was, and there were parts of us that just didn’t fit together. You know it.” He has to know it, because she swears it’s written somewhere. ‘Logan and Veronica: Too Broken to Make a Life Together’. There’s a second volume, too, called ‘Why Nineteen Year Olds Shouldn’t Date: Logan and Veronica’.

“You don’t know that.” He crosses his arms and sets his mouth and she hates him when he’s like this, because when he’s like this she feels like he’s going to be able to change her mind.

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she says quickly, “because it’s been years and we didn’t and it doesn’t matter. Because you obviously moved on. And so did I.”

He snorts, and turns away from her. “So, uh, you going to be my lawyer and my private eye?”

Just like that, he changes the subject. Throws her off-kilter, because she was expecting him to come back again, to needle her and work her last nerve until she wants to strangle him. This new Logan is a creature she doesn’t quite know how to handle, and she doesn’t like that. She doesn’t like that when she was away, he grew up on her. 

“I can’t, because I haven’t taken the bar yet. And if I had, I’d still only be able to defend you in New York. So you should try to be accused of dastardly crime in New York next time.”

He throws her a soft smile, and she can’t help but smile back. “Nah, you could. I remember my Legally Blonde. You just need a licensed attorney to vouch for you or something.”

“Well, as long as we’re getting legal advice from romantic comedies, I think we’ll win this,” she tells him wryly, and resists the urge to go over and pat his arm. Instead, she coughs. “Who’s your lawyer? I’ll ask about bail.”

“Who do you think? Cliff.”

She coughs. “Cliff? Like, Cliff-Cliff?”

“McCormack, yeah. Man with a voice of melted butter? Why wouldn’t I hire him?”

“Um,” she says, “Because you’re apparently one of the wealthiest men in Neptune, sans trust fund, and Cliff is a lawyer who can be and is regularly hired by hookers?”

Logan nods. “Yeah. That’s the guy. He does good work. And I know he’s not as twisted as some of the other lawyers, because he’s got the seal of approval from one Veronica Mars. He is your lawyer when you’re in town, is he not?”

“Yeah,” Veronica agrees. “Because I know no other lawyers and he’ll work for free as long as I do him favors. That’s not a ringing endorsement.”

He presses a finger to his mouth. “So, you don’t like Cliff then.”

“I love Cliff. I just don’t think Cliff is murder trial material. And I don’t think he thinks he is either.”

“He doesn’t,” Logan confides with the grin that always made her knees weak. “He told me to hire a different lawyer. He said this was too much work for him. It makes me like him all the more.”

“Logan -”

“Veronica, I didn’t kill her. Do you believe me?”

She looks away, and breathes deep. “You know I do. But I’m not going to be on the jury. And I don’t want this coming down to an attorney who advertises on the backs of bus stops and a private eye who’s been out of the biz for almost a decade. I don’t want to screw this up for you, and I need you to not screw this up for yourself. Can you do that?”

“You’re worried,” Logan seems to realize.

She lets out a hysterical giggle. “Of course I am, Logan. I’m rusty and this is your life and if I mess up, I don’t get to see you again. And I don’t want to leave anything to chance here, and you’re leaving everything to chance.”

He presses his face against the bars. “Hey, hey. You listen to me. I have been in a lot of jams. I’ve had the high priced lawyers. And I’ve even hired a couple of PIs who weren’t you in my time, even though I was appalled when they charged me. So, I know. This isn’t a risk. Even after - everything - you still care enough about me to fly across the country. And Cliff is good enough that he won’t stab me in the back. And that’s what I need. I need people on my side who I can depend on. I’ve had those other people, Veronica. And at the end of the day, you don’t get what you pay for. I want you. And I want Cliff. And if I fry, at least I know that you were working for me and not the dollar.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He leans back, and she attempts to not let him see her cry. “So what’s the next step?”

“I’m going to go talk to Cliff. See how far he’s gotten. You know. Preliminary work. I’ll probably be back.”

“Or, you could solve the case and get me out of here. That would work too.”

“Just so I know how that fits into your schedule.”

He smiles again, and leans against the bars. “I missed you. I’m glad you’re home.”

“Me too.” The strangest thing, she thinks, is how that’s not a lie.

~~~

“When you figure out that your little boyfriend there did his girlfriend in,” Sheriff Dan tells her with the same knowing smirk that always made her blood boil when it graced his brother’s face, “I’ll be here.”

“Will you also be here when I figure out who actually did it, so a Mars can once again solve a crime for a Sheriff Lamb? Or will you be letting Sacks take point that day?” she asks saccharinely.

Sheriff Dan scowls. “That’s never going to happen. So when you go to sleep tonight, I want you to think about the sixteen times Logan Echolls bludgeoned his girlfriend in the head.”

“Really? Because if you’re twice the sheriff your brother was, I’m still four times better than you at this. And when I bring you the real murderer, I hope you’ve got on your grovelling shoes on, because you’re going to need them for all the backtracking you’re going to be doing when it comes to clearing Logan’s name.”

She leaves him speechless as she books toward the door, Weevil trotting to keep up with her.

“Still got your issues with authority, I see,” he pants, and she sneers in response.

“Those,” she tells him, “and a whole host of others that are just raring to come out and play.”

He bumps her, and she turns to look at him as they get to the parking lot. “I’m not judging, but maybe you were a little harsh in there, talking smack about the guy’s brother. He did die, you know. A little compassion wouldn’t be out of the question, n’est ce pa?”

Thrown, she can’t help but first ask, “French, Weevil?”

“Me and the missus,” he tells her, “we honeymooned in the south of France. Provence. On Echolls’ dime.”

The reminder of Logan gets her back on track. “Is he showing any compassion for Logan? Any understanding? Because until he stops being such a smug asshole and starts working, then no, I don’t think I should be any different about his brother.”

Weevil grins at her. “I forgot about your mama bear routine when it comes to him.”

“What are you talking about?” she demands as she swings her bag off of his shoulder onto her own.

“Just that you got pretty intense there, over Echolls. Were willing to rip the sheriff a new one. And I can remember a time when I was on the receiving end of it. In fact,” Weevil continues, “I remember getting shit from you when you weren’t even that fond of Echolls at the time. Yelling at me for thinking he could possibly have killed my best friend, icing me out for burning down his house. Mama bear stuff.”

She reddens, and quickly shrugs. “So, I get a little defensive. What of it?”

“Nothing. Just find it - curious is all.” He gifts her his smuggest grin. “I also think I’m going to be winning the bet.”

“What bet?”

“Me and Echolls, we’re betting on the chances of you two hooking up. He lowballed the odds. Between you and me I think he’s feeling a little insecure. But I knew. The second you jumped when he told you to, I knew.”

“You don’t know anything,” Veronica tells him as she slides into his car, and Weevil gently knocks on the roof twice before getting in himself.

“Nah, I only watched this song and dance go down like a thousand times between you and him. I can’t figure out when the chorus comes in at all.”

“I have a boyfriend, and an apartment nowhere near here. A job, that I’m going to love. So, no. Not happening.”

“Sure,” Weevil placates her. “Of course not. Where are we headed?”

“Don’t think I’m going to forget about this, because I won’t,” she tells him, “but we’re off to see Cliff. You know -”

“Yeah, I know Cliff.” Weevil pulls out of the space, and then throws the car into park. “So, how’d he look? As good as me?”

This time when she tries to punch him, she attempts to make it hurt. At least a little.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks go to GhostCat and JaqofSpades, who made this chapter infinitely better with their edits and suggestions.

Veronica has seen Cliff enough in the intervening years to not be shocked at how much he hasn’t changed. His ties are still loud, his hair is still dark (if now obviously dyed), and his voice is still designed by God to sell undesirables - things, facts, people - and sell them hard.

“Veronica Mars,” he booms out when he sees her, and she steps away from Weevil to let him hug her. Just because. “Nice to see you’re back in town. Does your father know yet?”

“Does he know which part?” she answers. “The fact that your client is my client, and our client is Logan, or that I’m going to be crashing in the guest room tonight?”

“The guest room is still your room,” Cliff tells her. “Down to those charmingly sleazy money shots you’ve had as decorations since you got into the biz. Your dad didn’t do anything except get you a new mattress, kiddo.”

Twenty eight years old, she reminds herself. Not a kiddo. Except, it’s Cliff; so she doesn’t frown at him nearly as hard as she usually does when someone deages her.

“I’m all grown up, Cliffy,” she rebuts and he chortles and hugs her again, pulling her tight against his side.

“You’ve always been grown up, Veronica. And you’ll always be a kid to old geezers like me and your dad. It’s just your cross to bear. But I’m sure you didn’t come here to wax philosophic about aging and the temerity of your father’s old friends to remember you as you were instead of just as you are. Maybe you’re here to talk about how your Krampus Christmas card scared away a couple paying clients before I removed it from the office.”

She ignores Weevil’s snicker. “I’m here to talk about Logan, and his bail. You hung the card up in the office?”

Cliff sits on the corner of his desk and instantly is at eye level. “Of course I did. The forked tongue picture, with the ‘This card made me think of only you, my sleaziest of lawyers’ inscription? I can’t think of a more robust recommendation than that. Of course, it’s only good so long as my clients don’t figure out that I’m your only lawyer.”

“That doesn’t change anything. Even if I had a hundred lawyers, I’m sure you’d still be the only one I’d consider classy with a k.”

The thing she appreciates about Cliff is this, the rolling with her punches, because he just smiles his pearly whites and moves on. “Logan Echolls. I’m assuming you’ve talked to him?”

“Yeah. He’s the one who told me you were his lawyer.”

Cliff smirks. “And what did you say?”

“To get a new lawyer.”

Cliff laughs, and leans forward. “It’s good to see you haven’t changed, Vee. I have a rough timeline of the events of the evening, and I’m working on securing the evidence the DA has, along with the list of potential charges. You’re going to want all of that, I assume?”

“You assume correctly,” she tells him, nodding, so far satisfied with Cliff’s efforts. As much as she would have liked it if Logan had hired another lawyer, one who was used to high profile cases and who had a sizable record of doing more than getting Loretta Cancun out of trouble, she can’t find it in herself to deny the sheer pleasure she’s getting out of working with Cliff. There are no hoops she has to light on fire, no lives she has to make hell before she gets what she came for. The best part of coming home, she decides, is how the people there are already aware of her every capability. “And bail?”

He hesitates, a fraction of a second too long, and everything she is goes into high alert. “I’m having a bail hearing set, but I’m not wild about his chances unless you’re able to do a magic trick.”

“Why?” She asks the question when she’s already afraid she knows the answer. She asks it with the old brittleness in her voice she thought she’d outgrown. Or at least had left behind. 

Cliff glances at Weevil, who shrugs, and she takes it all in and realizes Weevil’s held out on her. And that Logan has too. The familiar bit of panic starts. 

She pushes it back. She’s not sixteen, and this isn’t an ambush. She repeats that thought as Cliff tells her, “That answers the question of whether or not you’ve done any preliminary research before jetting here.”

Irritated, she rolls her eyes, hating that she has to explain herself again. Hating that she has to justify her reaction to Logan again. “Got a call, packed a bag, hopped a flight. Got here, and was immediately sent to you.”

The two men walk to the nearest computer, and Cliff waves her over. “You’re going to need to see this.”

It’s youtube, and she glances at each of them as a commercial with cartoon bears comes on. It only lasts the fourteen seconds, though, because then it’s Logan, handcuffed, looking harried and lost and furious. It’s like she’s staring at him when he was seventeen again, and she knows he’s going to do - has done - something incredibly stupid.

She hears a reporter shout out, “Logan! This is the second time you’ve been arrested for murder. What are you going to do?”

And she stares as his face becomes hard, the way it used to, the way she remembers it doing before he got mean and delivered a verbal blow.

“I’m going to get the *bleep* out,” he sneers back, pushing against an officer who she thinks might be Sacks. “Which countries don’t extradite?”

And then she watches him deflate and let himself get put into the back of the car, witnesses the edge slide off of him. Knows that if his arms hadn’t been handcuffed, he would have thrown them up in the air in defeat. And the desire to kick him firmly in the shins floods through her. 

“In a manner of seconds,” Cliff tells her, “he managed to shoot himself and us in the foot.”

“That’s Logan for you,” she mutters. “Why do things the easy way when you can struggle and fail to do it after making it impossible?”

The air turns icy, and she meets Weevil’s glare head on with one of her own. “That ain’t fair to him, Vee. He’s changed.”

“Really?” She volleys back, and allows the hysteria gripping her lungs to seep into her voice. Because she’s foolish, oh so foolish, for leaping back into this life when, if she’d stopped and thought for half a second, she knew how it was going to go. Who he was going to be. “Because from what I just saw, he’s the same self-destructive asshole he’s always been.”

Cliff shakes his head, and gets out a “Vee -” before her lip curls up and she cuts him off. “Do what you can to get him out, but I’m going to need everything you have. Right away.”

She marches forward and stares Weevil down. “Eli. I’m going to need to get to Mars Investigations.”

“Yeah,” he grunts at her. His eyes are hard and she stares at his muscles coiled and the fists clenching and unclenching. “Sure thing.”

He pauses, before sneering, “Boss.”

She battles back the flinch at his tone, at his obvious disenchantment with her. She’s not going to give him that. Logan hasn’t grown up, and she won’t let herself get turned into one of his lost boys. Not even if it means making Weevil proud of her. She’s dealt with his unhappiness before; she’ll do it again.

“Can I have a moment?” Cliff cuts in, interrupting their staring match. “Veronica?”

“Sure. Yeah.” But she doesn’t take her eyes off of Weevil until he snorts derisively and turns away.

“I’ll pull the car around,” he says as he leaves, and she exhales.

“What do you need?”

Cliff’s eyes are soft, and she immediately wishes she’d continued battling Weevil, because whatever Cliff is about to say is going to hurt.

“Vee,” he starts, and then pauses. “Logan Echolls has had me on retainer as his lawyer since almost right after you left. And there were times - are times - when I know your frustration, because he can be a little shit. But in the years you’ve been gone, it’s stopped being me arranging for bail from the fall out of one of his stupid stunts and gone to me finding him the right lawyers to handle things like property law and nonprofit investments.”

“What are you saying? That the Logan Echolls who fucked us and himself because being a smart ass was more important than anything else isn’t Logan at all? That I should just - forget the fact that I’ve been in town less than 5 hours and I’m already -” She sucks in air, and dabs the end of her nose with the sleeve of her shirt; works her jaw and struggles to find the words to explain it, to Cliff. To herself. “I asked him not to screw this up, and he knew he’d already done it.”

Cliff nods, and hands her a tissue, and waits as she blows her nose. “You’re disappointed.”

“No, I’m not,” she tells him, something that’s very much not disappointment settling into her bones. “Being disappointed would mean I expected something different. I have to go.”

“It’s alright to be, you know,” Cliff tells her, and she doesn’t turn to look at him. “It was a stupid move from a man smart enough to know better.”

She shrugs, and Cliff sighs. The office fills with an oppressive silence, begging to be broken. If she were a different person, Veronica thinks, she might need to do that. But as luck would have it, she isn’t. She’s more than content to be staring at something that might be considered art on Cliff’s wall as she denies him eye contact. 

Cliff breaks first.

“I’ll send over a copy of my file, Vee. You going to work from the office or from home?”

“The office.” Best to keep Logan in the office, rather than having him invade her father’s apartment. 

Cliff smiles, as if he knows. “Say hello to your dad for me, kid. Tell him I’ll drop by sometime this week or next for the lunch he owes me.”

She doesn’t smile back. But she gives him a stiff nod before she marches through the door.

~~~

She steps out into the Neptune sun, and Weevil revs the engine. She’d like to think it’s to let her know where he is, but she’s fairly certain it’s out of a newborn frustration with being her driver.

“If you don’t want this gig anymore, paco, you can just drop me off at the nearest rent-a-car,” she sneers as she slides into the passenger seat, and watches as Weevil’s grip on the steering wheel tightens.

“Fuck you,” he tells her. “Echolls is paying me to cart your ass around, so I’m going to be carting your ass around. I don’t care how much more comfortable it would be for you if I wasn’t.”

“I wasn’t thinking about my own comfort there, Eli,” she tells him, emphasizing his name. “I was just trying to help you out. Since you’re obviously pissed at me.”

“Of course I’m pissed at you,” he spits at her. “You come here and the first second Echolls has done even something remotely stupid, you act like it’s your fucking cross to bear. Like he did it specifically to fuck you over, when it’s him on the line.”

“Oh, I don’t think he did it just to fuck me over. I think he did it because he’s a fuck up, and he’s pulled me into his mess. And I let him. But you know what I’m really mad about?”

“What?” Weevil snarls. “Tell me. I’m dying to know over here.”

“You did it to me too. I mention bail, and this little incident doesn’t even cross your mind as something that I need to know? I need to find out about it in Cliff’s office? In front of him? He’s my dad’s friend, and I just got railroaded by you and your buddy in there, okay? So, yeah, you tell me I’m still your girl and then you take his side.” 

She is shaky, and Weevil goes quiet. She sees him glance at her as he drives, and she turns away from him and presses her forehead against the window to help combat the intense pounding behind her eyes. She watches Neptune go by, as Weevil goes from the wrong side of the tracks to the wronger side of the tracks. To an office she’s never worked in, because the one she considered her home away from home was sold to make way for a Taco Bell. Another Taco Bell in southern California, she thinks. What the world has come to.

“I didn’t mean to do that,” Weevil says apologetically, breaking into her thoughts about the travesty of Taco Bell placements. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like you were on the outside. I just didn’t think it was my place to tell you.”

“Yeah, well, it did.” She still doesn’t look at him, and she hears him sigh.

“What’s the deal, here, Vee? I get that you think I did wrong.” The end of his sentence dangles, asking her to answer it. Depending on her not to be able to not. It’s scary, she contemplates, how well Weevil still knows her. How he still can bank on her varying needs - the ones she’d thought she’s conquered - and get her to do what he wants her to do.

“Do you know how many people have already seen that clip? At least 23,968, because that’s the view count I saw on YouTube. Do you know how many of them live in Neptune? I don’t, but I’m going to guess quite a few of them are either here or from here. There’s no such thing as objective truth, there’s no such thing as an untainted or unbiased memory, and there’s no way I can do what needs to be done if I don’t--”

She stops and breathes in.

“What you did wrong, what you and Logan did wrong, is you didn’t trust me and you didn’t respect me. I can’t do my job if my client doesn’t trust me, and I won’t do it if he doesn’t respect me.”

“He respects you, Vee, and he trusts you too. Even eight years on, he does.”

“Well,” she scoffs, “he’s got a funny way of showing it.”

“You know,” Weevil starts, agitated, “if you gave him some rope -”

“It doesn’t matter how much rope I’m willing to give him,” she growls, “if all he’s going to do with it is hang himself.”

The car gets quiet, and she pulls inward and waits for Weevil to say something - anything. He doesn’t.

She sees it, like a movie reel, every time she let herself get pulled into Logan’s orbit, every time she felt like she was flying, and then the sickening plummet of the fall. Every time, there was a fall.

“It’s going to screw him over, one of these days. It might be this, today. Today might be the end of the line for him. And this time, do you know what I did? I blew off my boyfriend, because I was so desperate to get to him. Because he needed me. Because he wanted me. I was stupid.” She laughs. “He makes me feel so stupid. And I’m done feeling stupid over Logan Echolls.”

She sees Weevil tense up in the driver’s seat, and knows what’s coming. “You’re going to need to call yourself a cab back to the airport. Because if you’re just up and leaving again, I’m not going to be your getaway driver.”

“Oh, Eli,” she draws out. “You sweet talker, you. You have such faith in me, what could I do but stay?”

Off his look of consternation, she gets serious. 

“I’m not leaving.” She opens up the car door, and he gets out too, popping the trunk on the way. “Just because I’m done being stupid over him doesn’t mean I’m going to let him fry, even if he’s desperately trying to flip the fucking switch himself.”

Weevil goes silent, and Veronica sniffs back the last of her feelings. She glances back to make sure he’s following, and makes her way to the new Mars Investigations headquarters.

“He’s not, you know,” Weevil tells her as he catches up, rolling her suitcase along behind him. “He’s an idiot sometimes, but he’s not fucking suicidal, and he’s not self destructive. Not anymore.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Weevil stops, and cups her elbow to stop her too. “There’s this thing that happens, I don’t know if you’ve done it, where someone thinks the worst of you and in that moment you’re powerless to do anything else but prove them right. Like, they know which button to push to make you their dancing monkey. It happened to me when that fucking asshole fired me for stealing the card machine. And I’m pretty sure it happened to him, then.”

“Regression,” she names as she struggles to block out her own history of it, and he head tilts at her. 

“What?”

“You’re describing regression. Psychologically speaking.”

His grin lights up his face. “I forgot you got with the whole book learning thing.” She nods, and the same pleasure she always got when Weevil was proud of her rushes through her. “So, you get it.”

“I get it. You make a surprising amount of sense sometimes.”

He bumps shoulders with her. “Yeah, well, I’m a pretty smart guy.”

“Yeah, you are,” she tells him seriously, and his grin turns to shocked pride, before he ducks his head down.

“You think?”

She shoulder bumps him back. “I know.”

He smiles, and goes with her to the door, stays with her as she unlocks it. Carries her suitcase up the stairs, and they both look at the new door to the new office. 

“No stained glass,” she mutters. “More light. Open. I don’t like it.”

“It is a little less traditional,” Weevil agrees. “A little -”

“Soulless.”

“I was gonna go with ‘white’, but yeah, that works too.”

They walk in, and she grins at the sight of her old desk sitting among the new furnishings. Battered and scratched but still present. Weevil puts her suitcase down next to it as she runs her hand along the edge. 

“Hey, you,” she cooes at it. “We’re going to have some fun together.”

“You’re talking to a desk, Vee,” Weevil tells her, and she turns around and gives him a faux sultry look.

“Hey, you. We’re going to have some fun together.”

“None of that,” he scolds. “Do you need me to hang around?”

“Nope,” she tells him as she plops down in her old chair. “I’m going to be in research mode for a little bit. You can go snuggle with your honey or whatever it is reformed gangbangers do in their spare time.”

“Thanks for that,” he grunts, throwing her a small glare. “I’m going to go home, see my wife. Maybe get some food. Call me if you need anything. But try not to need anything in the next 3 to 5 hours.”

“There’s nothing I can say in response that isn’t wildly inappropriate now, so,” she stops, and waves him off.

“Not even ‘have fun’?” he asks as he saunters back toward the door.

She bites her lip to quell the salacious smirk. “Definitely not that. See you later, Weevs.”

He stops at the entrance, and looks back at her.“ She’s knows that expression. Has seen it before on her father’s face, on Wallace’s face. Even on Logan’s. But never before on Weevil’s, because he had always been the person at her side when she was in her ‘faster, pussy cat, kill kill’ phase. He was always the one who knew that she couldn’t stop, because he couldn’t either. “Don’t kill yourself here, Vee. It’s probably not going to be a flash in the pan.”

She has this sudden want to sit him down and tell him about the couple of years of therapy she’s had, the sessions she still attends. She wants to reassure him, to make sure he knows she’s not going to go down that path again. That she’s not going to pull him or anyone else down that road. But it’s a moot point. She either will, or she won’t; and for the life of her, she doesn’t know which way the pendulum is going to swing. 

Because she can’t do that, can’t sooth those fears; all she has to offer is, “They never are, are they?”

~~~

Once Weevil is gone, she gets to work setting up shop. Which is mostly just pulling out her MacBook and putting it down on the desk. Then Veronica sits. 

It’s a funny thing, willfully injecting herself back into an obsession she’d worked so hard to break. Back into the place that created and fed that addiction. There’s a reason she hasn’t taken on a case in years. Sliding back in is a frightening prospect when she worked so hard for so long at pulling herself out.

She had a professor once tell her that finding a mission, a thing that gave the subject focus and ties to the world, was the key to battling an addiction. She’d felt uncomfortable, shifting in her seat, because hers was her mission. 

There were days, weeks, when the urge to solve some minor crime whittled away at everything else until there was nothing left but the questions she needed to answer. When the bodega down the block was robbed. When one of her classmates was being stalked, and the restraining order wasn’t doing its job. When the dog walker down the street had two golden retrievers for two weeks, and then only one for a couple of days. Her brain would go into hyperdrive. Did the police think to cross check the security footage with the footage from the camera across the street at the ATM? Did the guy have a background in harassing women, and were those potential women willing to come forward? Did something happen to Peanut Butter?

It still takes hold of her, some days, this need to figure out the puzzles she sees. But she can walk by them now, without them battering her into submission. It’s taken a long time, but she can stop herself from even thinking those thoughts. And now, they’re coming back, flying through her head and zipping off in different directions, calling to her, begging her to follow.

And she is desperate to run after them. She burns to.

If it were anyone else but Logan, she would walk away. She would have to. Because she doesn’t want to be that person again, the one who got tunnel vision. The one who screwed up everything she touched. Regression, Weevil said, and she knows it too well.

But it is Logan.

She opens her laptop, and starts where she has always started. She creates the case file. Then the suspect files in the case file. Weevil and Logan get their own files, and she types out what she knows about each of their nights. She’s going to have to actually interview Weevil, figure out when Logan called him in the scenario. If it was when he was in the apartment, or after; when he’d been arrested. She’s going to have to know what Weevil did with his night. She pulls out her phone, and makes a note of it, sets it to go off in 5 hours.

Then she opens up her browser and types in the URL for Prying Eyez. She never let her subscription to it expire. It was a tie to this old world that she just couldn’t cut. Like a very weird, uncomfortably detailed safety blanket. She types in Logan’s dead girlfriend’s name, and stares at the screen. And then opens up another tab.

She looks up pictures of Katrina Bliss, because sometimes her masochism wins out over her self preservation. What she finds is a brunette. Tall. Thin. Beautiful. Worldly. Sexy and she knows it.

Logan always had two types, Veronica reflects. The sexy and she knows it type, the Lillys and the Kendalls and apparently Katrina, and the sweetly trusting innocent. The Hannahs and the Parkers. She never fit well into either of those categories. Too fractured to be trustingly innocent, not experienced or confident enough to be walking sex. She still doesn't, she thinks, gnawing at her lip. She’s still just trying to figure everything out, so she’s never reached worldly; she’s never managed to regain that innocence lost either. And Logan's tastes don't appear to have evolved.

It doesn't matter, anyway, she reminds herself, because she has Daniel and isn't up for or interested in getting back on the Logan Echolls roller coaster. And Daniel’s tastes are part of what she’s learned to leave alone, so she doesn’t have to examine how she doesn’t measure up.

She has Daniel, and never called him to let him know she arrived okay, she thinks with a wince before picking up her phone.

Logan would have been livid, would have called seventeen times by now, and half of those would have ended in messages of increasing panic. Weevil would have tracked her down himself, if he was worried. Wallace and Mac would have called, or texted. But Daniel hasn’t done any of that, and just picks up the phone with a clipped, “Veronica?”

She stretches out her, “Hey,” apologetically, and then tells him, “I got here safely.”

“Good to know,” he answers, sounding irked. “It would have been better to know a couple of hours ago, when your plane was supposed to have landed, but I guess I’ll take what I can get.”

“I know, I know,” she says. “I’m being a terrible girlfriend right now. I was surprised at the airport by an old friend of mine, and I got so caught up in catching up with him and then meeting up with Logan that I completely forgot that I was supposed to call.”

He sighs in New York, and she feels all the worse. “Veronica, you’re not supposed to call. It’s not something I want you to feel obligated to do. I want you to want to call me, and I was actually worried. It’s not like I have the numbers of anyone there, with the exception of your father, so I couldn’t even call anyone to ask if they’ve seen you because you told me you weren’t stopping in to see him until later in the day. And I didn’t want to upset him if there wasn’t a reason.”

This is why she and Daniel work, she thinks. Because he knows not to do things like call her father. It’s a small thing, but it’s enough.

“Thanks, yeah,” she tells him. “I haven’t had a chance to catch up with him yet.”

She waits for the rebuttal, for Daniel to tell her that she’s avoiding him and it has nothing to do with chance. It doesn’t come.

“You’ve been busy?”

“Oh, yes,” she tells him. “I’m working on developing a background knowledge of the case, you know, figuring out who Katrina was so I can come up with a list of people who would have opportunity to kill her.”

There’s a large amount of silence coming from the other end of the phone, and she x’s out of the pictures of the pop star. 

“Are you sure,” Daniel finally says, “that he didn’t kill her?”

“Yes,” she tells him, her tone brooking no disagreement. 

The silence returns. “It’s likely, you know, statistically speaking. I saw the arrest video, and he’s not exactly looking innocent. And that one had links to older ones, bum fights and fist fights and -”

Damn Logan Echolls, she thinks, before she answers her boyfriend. “Logan is an asshole, and he’s a drama king, but I know him. He wouldn’t kill anyone.”

“It’s been years,” Daniel protests, “You don’t know him anymore. How come you’re so convinced you know that?”

Veronica is on the roof of the Neptune Grand, watching her 18 year old self with a gun in her hand, pointing it at the boy who has, in a manner of minutes, stripped everything from her. She watches Logan reach toward this other Veronica, and can’t quite make out - can’t quite remember - what he said to her to make her not shoot. But she watches herself lower the gun, watches herself give it to Logan. And watches as Logan doesn’t pick it up again to shoot Beaver.

“I know,” she tells Daniel, “because no matter how much Logan might have changed, no matter how much he hasn’t, he’s never been the guy who had it in him to kill anyone.”

“Oh, okay,” Daniel sarcastically says. “I guess there’s a difference between beating the crap out of someone and murdering them.”

“There is,” she protests, shifting some of her attention back to her search. “There’s a big one, actually, in that in one case the person is dead and in the other they’re alive. In fact, I’d say that’s probably the most profound of differences.”

Daniel groans, and she blocks him out as she hits enter.

Prying Eyez brings up very little for Katherine Boscove, and that fact alone heightens Veronica’s already heightened levels of uneasiness about this case.

But she puts it aside as she gives in to her other, more pressing, bit of curiosity - looking up Logan Echolls for the first time since she abandoned Neptune, California.

Veronica has never fainted, at least not without help from some powerful pharmaceuticals, but she imagines this is what it's like - the world tilts and falls away.

Daniel is still talking, questioning how she could possibly help Logan out of this jam and why she would want to, how a psychology major and a future lawyer is an asset to a man who probably could afford a team of the best of both, and she can hear him and make out the individual words but not enough to actually put together any kind of meaningful response. 

"I'm going to have to call you back," she whispers to the phone, hitting the top button at almost the same time to disconnect. Because what she's seeing is an arrest record for one Logan Echolls, for battery. Which wouldn't be a surprise, because its Logan, if not for who pressed charges, and where.

And underneath, is a list of the slew of hospital bills he neglected to pay, until they were taken care of by a trust whose name she’s only come across one other time in her life.

It hasn’t been five hours. It hasn’t even been one, but there’s only one person she can think to call right now.

"Weevil?" She waits until she hears the grunt on the other end of the phone before continuing. "We need to go on a little road trip. To San Diego.”

“Now?” he sputters. “Vee, I just got home to my wife, whom I have no desire to piss off.”

“Yes, right now. Tell her I'm very sorry but it's Logan."

“What about him?” Weevil asks sharply. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. Want to tell me about his getting arrested with Arturo a couple years back?”

Weevil is quiet on the other end of the phone. Then she hears a muffled discussion. “I’ll come get you, and then we’ll take a little trip. I didn’t get all the details about that one. Neither one of ‘em was talking much. And Arturo never really gelled with me anyway, especially not after I started living clean.”

“I’ll see you in ten?”

“Make it more like twenty.” She starts to protest, and he cuts her off. “Vee, it was years ago, and I’m going to get some with my wife or else she might try to kill you. And I’m not sure who would win in that fight, but I definitely know I never want to find out.”

“Twenty then,” she grudgingly agrees. “But if you’re late, just know that I still have my taser and my finger is getting itchy.”

“Noted,” he says, and hangs up.

She bounces for a second. She could call Daniel back, explain to him a little of her life at sixteen and seventeen. Explain to him how working for her dad in her teens wasn’t exactly just receptionist material. Work on explaining to him why this is so important to her, why Logan is so important to her, when she’s spent the whole of their relationship not talking about him or this or Neptune at all. 

She could tell him about Weevil, about his new tattoos and his old ones, and how he upgraded to a car and got a wife. But that would mean talking to Daniel about Weevil, which she also actively has avoided. She could talk to him about the weather. That would be a safe topic. But even Daniel, even keeled and loving Daniel who lets her keep her secrets, would probably start to pry once she decided to hang up on him. So that’s out.

Instead, Veronica decides to do what she always used to - prioritize the case. In this instance, the case of why Aaron’s Kidz, with a ‘z’, paid for Logan’s medical bills.

~~~

When Weevil pulls up, 20 minutes and a few odd seconds after they’d hung up, talking about how he didn’t want to get tased in the ass, her head is full of questions still left unanswered. She slides into the passenger seat of his car, and lets him riff about her aborted attempts to cock block him without interruption or complaint until he finally stops.

“What’s going on, here, Vee?” he asks. “Usually, you’d be firing away at me.”

“Charlie Stone. Do you know about him?”

Weevil gives her a sidelong glance, and nods. “I know him. Why?”

“You know him?” Her voice cracks, and she shakes her head. “That explains a few things.”

“What do you think it explains, exactly?”

She gulps in some air, and fiddles with the radio. “Aaron Echolls’ lawyers hid him, pretty deep, but I found him freshman year. He was getting a payout from a trust named ‘Aaron’s Kidz’. Hush money and child support combined. He’s the one who paid off Logan’s medical bills. I just don’t know why Logan wouldn’t.”

“He didn’t because that was still when he was spiralling,” Weevil tells her. “That was one of those nights when I should have gotten him, had us beat each other bloody, but instead I fucking let that surfer asshole he always hung with drag him out to San Diego. So, I was home with Miranda - my wife - when it all went down. I’m serious when I tell you I don’t know what happened though.”

“And he was hurt? Like really hurt?” she asks, feeling small, and he reaches over and squeezes her shoulder for a second before he has to concentrate on the stick shift again.

“Yeah, he was pretty fucked up. He’s got pins and shit keeping his elbow in place, and something happened to his hip.”

“Did Trina come back?”

Weevil lets out a bark that, under other circumstances, could have been a laugh.

“Sent a telegram. And a fruit basket that made him throw up. I didn’t get it.”

She does. She remembers. She hates herself for asking, hates that she had some strange notion, a sliver of hope, that she hadn’t left him utterly alone in the world when she went. But she had, until Weevil and apparently Charlie stepped up to the plate. And she hates herself more for knowing that she wouldn’t have done anything differently. Because as much as it pains her now, knowing that she did that to him, staying had been killing her. Her life had left her wrecked, strung out and splintered, and at nineteen she had to put herself first.

Veronica reminds herself of that, but it doesn’t make the guilt any less potent. It doesn’t make her feel any better about herself.

Weevil eases them onto the highway, and glances in her direction. Again and again, brief flicks of concern. She would smile at his care, but she’s still too wrapped up in her imaginings of what had happened, and too wrapped up in her plans to access Logan’s medical records to see the actual damage done. She’s going to have to put in a call to Mac.

“I wonder if I could just ask Logan for them,” she mutters, and Weevil’s apprehensive look deepens. 

“You okay, there, Vee?”

She sighs. “Just feeling guilty. And working on how to turn that guilt into the fuel I’m going to want in order to get this done.”

“Don’t,” he commands sharply. “You listen to me, got it? Logan Echolls was going to end up in some hospital at some point in time for some reason or another. You aren’t the cause of his shit, Vee. You aren’t the fucking strike point neither. Boy was going to do what he was going to do.”

“No, he wouldn’t have,” she argues, heated from this disparagement of her Logan. “He wasn’t that kind of destructive, not by the end of freshman year. Not anymore.”

She did it. She pushed him into doing it.

“And yet, apparently he was,” Weevil snarks back. “I get that you’re a weight of the world girl. But move past this. Because it wasn’t your fault then, and it’s not your fight now.”

She doesn’t meet his eyes, because it is her fight. She’s already planning the plans for how best to make Arturo pay, now without involving Weevil. 

“Yeah, not my fight,” she says, and Weevil watches her with his sharp eyes for as long as he can before he has to turn back to the road. The chances of him believing her are slim, she acknowledges that. He’s always been one of the harder people to game, and she’s been out of the biz for such a long time now that some of her skills have atrophied. But he doesn’t call her on it, doesn’t make her talk about it, and doesn’t try to convince her again. So she considers it a wash. As long as he doesn’t stand in her way, she’s fine with his place on the outskirts. She doesn’t want to risk him and his new life for this old vendetta she didn’t know about until now anyway.

~~~

The San Diego police department is busy and bustling when Veronica and Weevil arrive.

“What exactly do we need, here?” Weevil asks, and Veronica shrugs.

“Remember Leo D’Amato?” Weevil shakes his head. “He arrested you on more than one occasion. And we conned him on a different one. He’s the guy we’re looking for.”

“Is this because he arrested me, or -” Weevil asks, his eyes glinting mischievously at her. 

She scowls. “We’re looking for him, because (a) Leo is an old friend and will therefore be statistically more likely to help us with minimal effort from me, and (b) he was the arresting officer that night.”

“Alright, let’s do this and get out,” he grumbles, giving the area a one over.

She smirks. “Eli Navarro, are you uncomfortable in a police station entryway?”

“Just because this bird’s gone straight doesn’t mean the po-po don’t look at the tats and think I’m on their list for some most wanted,” he informs her. “And this goes doubly if we conned an officer here. That don’t exactly make me feel like getting comfy.”

“Leo’s not really one to hold a grudge,” she tells him. “And I never told him about your part in my little burglary.”

“Wait a minute,” Weevil stops and turns her toward him. “Are you telling me that one time I helped you steal from the sheriff’s department?”

“Yup, that’s what I’m telling you,” smiling at the memory, at calling Weevil and asking for a favor, telling him he had to keep the new deputy occupied until she gave him the signal. She teases, “Eli Navarro Esquire.”

“Oh, man,” he grins as she watches him remember that moment. “We were some badasses, you and me, Vee. And this is that guy?”

“Yeah, this is him.” She pauses, and looks at him quizzically. “What did you think we were doing, back then?”

If she didn’t know better, she’d bet Weevil was blushing. “I don’t know. I figured you were messing with Lamb or something. Didn’t really think about it too hard. Never did, in those days, when you came calling on me for a favor.”

She peers at him a moment more, certain that there’s a puzzle here she can’t quite make out, before turning her attention back to the task at hand. “We need to find someone who can direct us to Leo.”

“How’s about that guy?” Weevil asks, pointing to a nebbish looking man.

“Perfect,” she breathes, and makes her way toward him, Weevil hot on her heels. 

“Excuse me,” she greets in her higher pitch, “may I speak to Leo D’Amato?”

The guy looks at her, clearly unimpressed. Which may be because she doesn’t have it anymore, and may be because Weevil is practically pressed against her back, limiting how far she can push the sexy-for-you angle she was hoping to work. She gently presses against Weevil’s shin with her shoe, and he just inches closer.

“Do you have an appointment?”

“Well, no, but -”

“Are you here to report a crime?” the man continues, looking bored and a little put out that this has turned into his day.

“No.”

“Are you here to confess to a crime?” he asks, and Veronica huffs as Weevil snickers.

“No.”

“Then I’m afraid you’re going to have to make an appointment,” he tells her, looking completely unapologetic.

She forces the smile back onto her face, and says, “It will only take a minute, and we drove all this way -”

“You should have called ahead and scheduled a meeting,” the man emphasizes, belying his nebbish look by standing firm, “before driving all this way.”

She spots Leo from across the room, and nudges Weevil to take point in the discussion. He readily does, without so much as a befuddled look. Slips from Weevil’s side as he argues about whether or not they should be allowed to see Leo, as he demands to meet with the section chief, as he threatens to report the man, and just makes her way over to him.

“Hello, Deputy,” she purrs from behind him.

He stiffens, straightens up, and turns around, ducking his head in the way she has only the fondest of memories. “Hey, Veronica. It’s been a while.”

“It has,” she answers. “How have you been?”

He grins, and she has to smile back at him. 

“It’s been pretty good. I mean, I followed your lead and got out of Neptune. Stopped being a deputy,” he tells her meaningfully. “I’m a full fledged detective now.”

“Oh, Leo,” she tells him. “You’ll always be my deputy.” 

Companionable silence fills the air, and they both just look at the other. She categorizes the differences - he’s matured, fitter, and in plain clothes he’s as attractive as ever. 

“Yeah, well,” he finally says, “Had to grow up some time, right? And Neptune wasn’t exactly a place where I could count on having career advancement. Between the corruption and the nepotism, it seemed like I’d have better luck if I got out of dodge.”

“My father gave you that advice, didn’t he?” she asks, and Leo laughs.

“Yeah, he did. Even wrote me a letter of recommendation.” Crosses his arms and leans into her space. “I can’t tell you if it helped or hurt my chances. The LAPD didn’t even call me back.”

“You don’t want the LAPD anyway, D’Amato. Bunch of bullies. And the town? Not nearly as nice.” He nods. “I do have to say, though, that I miss you now that I’m back in town. Getting what I need from the Sheriff’s department has gotten a lot harder without you around to help me.”

“I remember the mutual back scratching I never actually benefited from. You haven’t found a new chump to take on that deal?”

“As of yet, no fish are biting,” she answers ruefully. “Do you think I’m losing my appeal?”

Leo gives her another once over, and she feels the littlest bit of pleasure at his attention. “No, I think you’ve still got it. You’ve always just had it.”

“Actually, that brings me to the reason why I’m here,” she says leadingly, and Leo looks out over the room. She knows when he catches sight of Weevil, because he shifts. She remembers this face, too. The face of a guy who didn’t want to do what she was asking, but who would anyway. If she pushed the right buttons.

“I don’t know, Veronica. This isn’t Neptune, and I’m not just putzing around anymore. I like this job. I’m good at it, and I’m doing real good, too. Whatever your buddy over there has gotten into, I don’t think I can just clean it up. I don’t think I’d want to.”

“Weevil’s clean,” she tells him firmly. “He’s just my ride. I’m not looking for anything here, Leo. I don’t want you to break any rules or to put yourself out there in any way. I don’t… I’m trying not to do that anymore.”

The troubled look doesn’t recede, not fully, but added to it is affection and worry. “What happened, Veronica?”

“You were the arresting officer, about six years back, for what was described in the press as a bar fight gone wrong. Logan Echolls,” her voice breaks, “was one of the people brought to the station. Can you tell me about that?”

“Yeah, I can. Of course. What’s this about?”

“You heard about him getting arrested again, for the murder of his girlfriend?” Off his nod, she continues. “Well, he asked me to investigate. And I came across this.”

“Can we get a cup of coffee later, or something?” He shuffles a bit, and gives her the puppy dog eyes she remembers best. “I’m kind of still on duty here.”

“Only kind of?” He rolls his eyes at her and she rolls them right back. “Yeah. We can do that. Can you bring a copy of the arrest record?”

“You know, one of these days, we’re going to have to work out a new deal,” he teases her. “One where there’s actually a benefit to me for all these favors I’ve done for you.”

She pretends to be shocked. “Deputy! Are you saying those few weeks of chaste kisses and hand holding aren’t enough to keep your loyalty a decade after the fact?”

“All I’m saying is, maybe in the interests of reciprocity, we could work at being more friends than just friendly. I heard tell that PIs and detectives sometimes relied on one another, back in the old days of black and white tv.”

“Well, while you’ll always have my eternal devotion,” she tells him as they make their way to Weevil, “I’m headquartered in New York now. This is just a mini vacation. But if you ever need any leads tracked down in the Big Apple, I’m your girl.”

“I’m going to hold you to that.” 

She grips Leo’s arm so they can listen as Weevil ramps up his rant against the police, the capitalist system, and the prejudice against people with tattoos, and laughs. She slides back by his side and Leo addresses the other man with a, “Hey, Frank, what’s going on here?”

Frank looks apoplectic, and Veronica cuts him off at the pass saying, “Oh, honey, maybe this man is right. We don’t need to see Leo right now.”

“Alright,” Weevil agrees, folding back into his affable persona. “We’ll have to make an appointment.”

Leo grins at them. “Want to meet at Hob Nob Hill? Get some food and some coffee in about an hour’s time?”

“Sounds great. Thanks, Frank, for all your help.”

Frank looks particularly flummoxed at this show of gratitude, and Veronica waves at him as she drags an almost hysterical Weevil out and down some steps.

“Oh, man oh man,” Weevil tells her once they’re on the outside. “I forgot how much fun your hijinks can be.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is finally getting released thanks in large part to GhostCat, who has unwittingly become my sounding board and cheerleader and, most importantly, beta. Words cannot express how grateful I am to her.

Hob Nob Hill takes them only a short amount of time to get to, but has a bit of a wait for a table for three. So Veronica sits on a curb outside the Victorian houses turned into offices and suns her face, eyes closed, as Weevil calls his wife.

Which is something she’s not thinking about, how Weevil has a wife and Leo is a detective and how they have other commitments, obligations, that come before what she needs from them. She’s not thinking about it, she’s decided, because if she starts thinking about how Leo and Weevil have not only moved on but moved up when she -

She breathes out slowly, and starts a count. Not of things she’s grateful for; since sixteen and Lilly, she hasn’t been so great at that game. But a count of things to accomplish. Get Logan out of jail. Get Logan cleared of any wrong doing. Get back to New York. Ace the firm’s final interview. Get the job lawyering. Get back to forgetting about Neptune.

To leaving all of this behind.

“Yo, Vee,” Weevil calls, “looks like our table is ready. We going in, or are we waiting on your detective?”

“I’m hungry,” she answers, not looking up yet, “so I say we go in and order, and let Leo come to us.”

She stands, brushes off her pants, and meets him at the door. “You’re paying, by the way.”

He grins. “So, I guess your bottomless pit of an appetite hasn’t gone away.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she answers. “We ladies only ever eat salads, and scoff at the idea of indulging in German chocolate cake.”

“Good to hear, because my wallet isn’t built to handle a non lady’s food consumption.”

“Weevil, Hob Nob Hill has very reasonable pricing. You should know this. This is the kind of swanky place to bring a date.” She smiles at the hostess, and nods for Weevil to follow them to their table.

She watches him look around, taking in the sights of the geriatric patrons and the teenagers from the park, the somewhat worn carpet and the tables pushed close enough together she could run entire credit checks on a mark before she was done with her meal. 

“Yeah, this is the place I’d take my wife on a date,” he says in a low voice after they sit down, “If I wanted to get shanked afterward.”

“Just wait till the food comes, my friend. I wasn’t joking about that German chocolate cake. Well,” she considers, “I was. But only about how I wouldn’t be ordering a slice. Or five.”

“Five?” Weevil laughs. “I can’t imagine even you could eat five.”

“I gotta take some home to the pops,” she tells him. “I figure it will make the perfect, ‘Surprise! I’m home!’ ice breaker.”

He makes a noise between a grumble and a growl at the fact she has yet to tell her father she returned, and she shrugs at him apologetically as she picks up her menu. 

She and Weevil sit in comfortable silence, and as she waits for the waitress to come, as she waffles between the special and one of their specialty burgers. She decides on the burger, just as Weevil clears his throat.

“So, you’ve been here before?”

“Yeah,” she tells him. “It’s good old American comfort food.”

“White American comfort food,” he mutters, and she laughs.

“Nothing you’d find in your Grandma Lettie’s kitchen, no.”

He flashes a quick grin, and glances at his menu again. “How’d you even find this place?”

“It was on Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives,” she answers breezily. He stares her down, and she shifts in her seat, gets serious. “When my dad was still Sheriff, the first time, every once in a while he’d have to come to San Diego. And sometimes, he’d bring me with him. We’d go to the park and walk around, and then come here if we were starving or drive down to El Indio if we weren’t yet - so, because I’m always starving, we ate here a lot.

And then, after Lilly, Dad lost his job, and Mom bailed - and when she left, the day she left, he brought me here. And, it’s not expensive, but it was still… We had to drive up here, and sit in this restaurant, and we ordered food like we always did and he joked around like he always did, and for a couple of hours, everything was normal. And then every once in a while, after he got a big pay day, we’d do it again. Just a little something that was from before.”

A little slice of normalcy, she thinks. And now, she’s contaminating it with Weevil and Leo and case files and Logan. But it still feels like home, still feels safe. Still feels like a place she could curl up and block out the unpleasant bits intruding on her life.

“Sounds nice,” Weevil tells her. “Like something the Sheriff would do.”

“Yeah, he was always doing his best to keep me a little bit normal. Too bad he failed miserably,” she jokes.

He doesn’t smile back. “Don’t do that. So, you’re not normal. You are who you are, Vee. And who you are has always been pretty fucking incredible.”

She flushes at that, and ducks back behind her menu. “What do you think Leo would want?”

“I’m not the one who dated him,” he retorts, and she glowers.

“Braised lamb it is,” she mutters, and then turns on her smile for the waitress, putting in her own order and Leo’s, finishing with, “And two cups of coffee.”

She nods, and turns to Weevil, who orders the Cobb Salad, much to her consternation. 

“What?” he asks off of her grimace. “We can’t all be human garbage disposals. Some of us actually had to start eating a little healthy after we hit our late twenties. How do you think I manage to look so good?”

“A hefty gym membership?” She asks, and he shakes his head. 

“Only gym worth going to in town got shut down.”

She smiles. “So, where did you meet your wife?”

Weevil transforms. That’s the only word for it. One second, she’s across from the guy she’s known for most of her life, one of the few people she’d call a friend from the age of sixteen on. And the next, he is something new. Someone new.

“You know, you’re kind of responsible for it, actually,” he tells her, ducking his head a little bit and smiling a soft little smile. “After your pops got me that job, one day this little terror of a girl comes flying in ranting about how we didn’t properly fix her ride and how she was going to fuck us all up. And I just walked right over to her, and asked what was the matter, and if she’d like me to do the work for free since she thought we’d screwed up the first time. And then, after it was all done, I asked her out on a date.”

She can feel her brow furrowing as she stares at him quizzically. “And how did I help, on either front?”

“Well, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have had a job there. And if I hadn’t dealt with your fits of self righteous fury enough over the years, I might have been either yelling back at her like the owner of the place, or cowering from her like the other two guys working there.” He leans back in his chair, and raps on the table with his fingers, banging out a loose melody. “Since I had, though, I figured it was safe for me to go on over. Didn’t think any girl could be any more dangerous than you. I was wrong - I wasn’t kidding when I said you two going head to head is the stuff of nightmares - but it definitely was something else.”

“Glad I could help out,” she tells him dryly, and he smirks.

“I always did have a thing for hot headed women with fire in their blood and who lacked a healthy amount of fear.”

She glances at him quizzically; but before she can press the point, she hears Leo. 

“Aw, so you come to me for a favor, but don’t even wait for me before you get to the food? That hurts, Mars.”

She smirks and turns in her seat, meeting his eyes. “I was hungry, Deputy. And you don’t want to keep a girl like me hungry. We get mean. Don’t worry, though. I took care of you, too. Ordered some braised lamb for the Greek in you.”

He pulls out the chair to her left and slides in it. “You know me well. Thanks. And did you -”

“I also got you a cup of coffee, yes. Now, what about what you have for me?”

“Well,” Leo tells her, “I got you the file. A copy of the file, with some of the non essential information redacted. And,” he continues, cutting her off before she could voice her outrage, “because I knew that was going to be a sticking point with you, I brought you a couple other presents too. All the information we had on your friend Arturo, and a couple of unsolved incidents from both here and Neptune that Echolls told us about.”

“Leo, you are an angel sent from heaven,” she sighs as she removes the files from his hands, and he rolls his eyes.

“Yeah, make sure you tell my section chief that when this all blows up in my face,” he shoots back as the waitress brings over their coffees. “Thanks.”

She doesn’t continue making conversation, just starts flipping through the first of the files. Looking for anything that will help.

Arturo Travieso. It’s in this moment that she realizes she never knew his last name. He was always just that punk of a kid who ran the PCHers after Weevil bowed out completely and Thumper got dead. The one she didn’t take seriously. The one who just looked so young. The one who made her, at 19, feel like she was looking at a baby. She stares at the rap sheet Leo included, to appease her. Armed robbery, intimidation, assault.

“Looks like Arturo grew up,” she murmurs, and Leo taps her wrist.

“Food’s here,” he tells her. “Maybe put the files down for a little bit.”

She looks up, and then at her burger off to the side. “Yeah, okay.”

Weevil snorts, like he can’t believe she’s going to let it go that easy, and she has to admit he’s right. Because all she does is maneuver the plate so it sits next to her open file, and continues reading as she eats. Puts aside Arturo’s file for the one involving Logan directly.

Logan got off with just a slap on the wrist, a fine for public intoxication - that he subsequently failed to pay, she notes, and was finally taken care of by one Charlie Stone. Arturo, though, got sentenced to 9 months in the state penitentiary, and served six of them, for battery.

The guys are making conversation around her, without her, and she doesn’t pay them any mind. Concentrates on Arturo’s last known address, and associates. 

“Before we leave,” she breaks in, not looking up from her research, “I really have to get that German chocolate cake.”

~~~

Her father’s car isn’t in the driveway when Weevil deposits her and her bag at the apartment. She lets loose a tiny sigh and lets the bag full of cake she’s been clutching sag a bit in her hand as she unlocks the door. She’ll get settled, she decides, and then be prepared when he finally does come home.

The door swings open, and as she steps through it she hears, “And the prodigal daughter returns to the homestead. What’s brought you back, oh child of mine?”

And winces. “Hiya, Pops. Didn’t think you were home.”

“Well, I’ve been parking around back recently,” he tells her, smiling affably. “Ever since Logan Echolls got himself arrested, and my darlingest daughter failed to make her nightly call to me.”

“I brought you cake. From Hob Nob.” She holds out the bag like a peace offering, and Keith stands and shakes his head.

“Honey -”

“German chocolate cake,” she continues, taking a right to the kitchen. “And I’ll let you have a piece if you’ve already eaten dinner. If not, it goes straight into the fridge for later.”

“I have had dinner, and you’re not going to distract me or ply me with cake. Even if it is delicious. We’re talking about this, now,” he tells her as he follows the cake. “So, plate me a piece of that and tell me why you’re back, and I’ll eat it and tell you why you’re wrong.”

He grins at her, lessening the potential blow. Veronica shakes her head, grabs a plate and fills a glass of milk, and sets them both in front of him. She rolls her shoulders, cracking, and starts. “Logan called. He needed help. I caught an early flight out of New York, and have been working on his case since I got back into town.”

He sighs, and puts down his forkful of cake. “Veronica, you’ve been out of the game for almost a decade. You have a new life in New York. You just had an interview to be the big shot city lawyer. You’ve been happy. You’ve wanted that, for yourself. And doesn’t Logan Echolls have more than enough money to hire more PIs than exist in the state of California?”

She shrugs, and steals his fork. “He asked me. He trusts me. And I’m not going to want to be a continent away, not knowing what’s happening. I don’t want to hope someone is going to figure this out. I need to help him.”

“No,” he argues. “You don’t. He is a grown man. He can figure out his own problems. You don’t owe him anything.”

“I don’t owe him. I don’t think I owe him. I just... No matter how far I get from this town or how long it’s been since we’ve talked, he’s still that guy that’s always been in my life. And he still wants me to - to do this for him. With him. And I want to do it too.”

She watches his head bow down. “If I asked you to, would you drop this? I’ll pick up the slack. I’ll charge him your going rate. Would you do it then?”

“No. And you wouldn’t charge him my rate, because I don’t charge Logan.”

“You don’t charge Logan? You don’t charge one of the people - Veronica. I think it’s good that Mac got the MBA instead of you, because you do not have a head for business.” She laughs, and he leans over and kisses her forehead. “I love you. And I just want you safe.”

“Believe me, that’s what I want too,” she tells him. Walks over and gives him a hug. “How about, we agree to disagree about Logan, and you tell me that you’re glad I’m home.”

“I’m always happy to see you, sweety. I would be happier if you didn’t think you had to steal into our home like a thief in the night, but I’m always happy when you’re safe and sound in your bedroom.”

She rolls her eyes at him, and grins. “I wasn’t doing that. I just didn’t want to get into a long discussion about Logan. Even though,” she tells him as she grabs her own plate for cake, “I’m probably going to ask you to work some of this case with me.”

Her father groans, and she laughs. “You said it yourself. I am a bit rusty.”

“You are so very lucky you are an only child. If there was someone to compete against to be the apple of my eye, some days you might be in trouble.”

“Nah. I would always be your favorite.”

He stands up, takes his cake, and moves to the living room. “I’m going to watch some tv. Maybe a Bogie film. You’re free to join me.”

She follows him out. “Only if it’s The Big Sleep.”

“Ah, Bogie and Bacall. Your taste in movies is only exceeded by my own.” He puts in the movie, and then pauses. “Does this mean you’re going to go to your ten year reunion?”

“Not you too.” 

“Hey, you’re already in town, you have plenty of things in your life to brag about, and if you haven’t solved the case yet, there will be plenty of people hanging around the old watering hole who might know something. Win-win-win.”

“And this has nothing to do with the fact that you and everyone else seems to think I should look back on those days with fondness and the bittersweetness only nostalgia can bring, right?”

Keith grins proudly. “Who said anything about fondness? I just want to hear you describe how they all look now, and a firm count on how many people you tear apart verbally before the end of the night. I’ve got 12 in the pool, by the way. Don’t go below that.”

“I’ll try to do right by you,” she drawls.

“That’s my girl.”

~~~

Even though she’s rusty, even though her father doubts her latent abilities, it’s pretty damn easy to track down Arturo.

And not just because he has a parole officer who’s a talker.

As easy as it is to track him down, though, it’s a little harder to get herself out of the car.

“Safe,” she thinks as she drives around the warehouse once, twice, three times. It’s a word that has been a given since she left Neptune, a piece of her existence she has learned to just accept being there. Until now. But with the adrenaline is pumping through her veins, she feels lighter than she has in years even as she hesitates before the entrance. It’s been a long time. It feels like it was only yesterday. It’s a dangerous combination. And it’s something she repeats to herself as she makes her way through the fence, keeping her eyes on the prize and her hand on her taser.

Finds him with a bunch of new PCHers, and the first thing she notices is how young they all are. Arturo aside. He’s now bigger, muscled; has what looks to be prison tattoos etched across his skin.

“Tight security you’ve got here,” she calls out, and all of their heads whip around. Most of them gape at her, and she gives a mock bow. “It was hell getting in. You have no idea.”

“Most people know not to tread on our territory,” one of the new members growls back, and she can’t contain the laugh that escapes.

“I can see that, yeah. Tell me, what does the Pacific Coast Highway Bike Club do to maintain that… aura of fear?”

“Don’t answer that,” Arturo commands the baby faces in front of her, and she takes that opportunity to walk in closer. Arturo moves to meet her in the middle. “She’s tricky.”

“Oh, you remember me. How sweet.”

“I remember you, lady. Hear your boy got pinched for murder,” Arturo crows, and she slides up and close.

“Not my boy,” she corrects. “But since you brought him up, let’s talk about your involvement in his current predicament.”

Arturo backs up slightly, and sneers. “What possible reason could I have for going after that white boy?”

“I have a pretty thick file saying you would think you had a lot of reasons. You’d be wrong, but a six month stretch could lead you astray like that. And considering the rash of home break in attempts and the fact that Logan got jumped by a bunch of people suspected of belonging to the PCH bike club and not just once, well, you can see where I’d be a little suspicious. Why you,” she sneers, moving closer, “would be number one on my list right now.”

He turns his head for a second, sneaks a peek at the rest of his gang, and then grins cockily at her. “Bitch, you have to get over that shit. I did. I ain’t got nothing to do with your - that - boy anymore.”

She smiles prettily back, and stalks closer. “See, that’s the best thing about being a bitch. I don’t have to get over shit. I decide it’s important, and that’s it. So let me make myself clear - I find out you had anything to do with this, I’ll dedicate the rest of my life to ruining the rest of yours.”

“Yeah? You and what army?”

“Oh, Arturo,” Veronica coos. “I’m not 19 anymore. I don’t need an army to take down your pathetic little operation. After all, this little meet up is like a wet dream if I wanted to put my lawyerly skills to work. All I’d have to do is bring one parole violation to light, and you’d be going away. For a long, long time. And that’s without you having done anything to Logan. But, my army? It’s the same as it’s always been, And they’re not 19 anymore either. So, that’s something to think about.”

“You got a washed up biker and who?”

“Where did I got these files from, huh, paco? Think on that.” 

She turns and walks away, exposing her back to them. It’s at times like these when she misses Backup, when she thinks that having a Backup Jr. or a Backup II would be ideal. But right now, it’s just her because her army is down at least two, with Backup being in doggy heaven and Logan being in jail. 

But what Arturo doesn’t know will hopefully spook him, maybe enough to slip up if he is the one behind this. 

She climbs into the car. Locks the doors. Her phone vibrates against her side, and she slides her keys into the ignition as she picks up. “Hello?”

“Hey there, Bobcat,” comes Logan’s voice from the other side. “Just calling to check in on your investigation.”

It isn’t that she’s surprised. Except, she is, because last she’s heard, he’s had his phone privileges taken away. So, she returns with, “Bribed some poor deputy into letting you use the phone, huh? Trying to get poor Sacks sacked, or what?”

“No, actually,” he says, “I’m out. For good behavior.”

When all she has to offer is shocked silence, he continues. “Well, more to the point, someone who will remain nameless but is related to our late, not so great, sheriff, ran his mouth off to the press this morning about how I have a history of violence, and some other crap, and now Cliff got me out on a technicality. I haven’t watched the video in question yet, but I hear it’s quite the doozy.”

“You’re out,” she echoes, and he stops.

“Yeah. I am. You sound like you have a problem with that.”

“I was just supposed to - No. It’s great. I’m glad.”

“Ronica,” Logan comes through over the phone, sounding amused, “Are you upset that you aren’t the one getting me out?”

“No,” she scoffs, “of course not. That would be stupid.”

It would be stupid, she thinks, but it’s not exactly not true. She’s supposed to be helping him. She’s supposed to be getting him out of the holding cells. She’s supposed to be solving the crime and clearing his name. And if she isn’t doing that, then dropping everything and coming back starts to make less and less sense.

“You’re still number one in my heart, Ronnie,” Logan jokes, answering her doubts. “Let’s meet up at the bar, talk things over.”

“What bar?” she asks, and puts her car in drive as he laughs.

“That’s right. You wouldn’t know. It’s my bar. Part of my club. 09ER.”

She nods absently. “I guess I didn’t get that far along in my preliminary investigation.”

“You’re investigating me?” 

“Checking up on you, looking at your past. Seeing who you could have possibly pissed off in the intervening years,” she answers. “Text me the address. I’ll meet you at the club.”

“Sure thing. Just make sure you don’t get lost, having been away for so long.”

“I have a GPS,” she shoots back, “but thanks for your concern.”

“Any time.”

~~~

The club is easy to find. It straddles the line between the rich and poor side of town, flaunting its moneyed self with its name and its valet parking. The list of people who could have a vendetta against Logan grows longer as she hands over her keys to some high schooler in a black shirt and suspenders. 

“That the uniform?” she asks, and the kid startles.

“Um, no? There isn’t really one, except for ‘look professional’,” the kid squeaks. She squints at him.

“Are you even old enough to drive?”

The kid’s eyes dart around, and a hand wraps around her upper arm. “Stop scaring my employees.”

“Logan,” she greets.

“Narc,” he answers.

“I’m going to need all of your employee’s records,” she says as he leads her past the bouncers and into the clubs. “Aside from the fact that any one of them could hold a grudge against you, I think you have a potential lawsuit on your hands if some of your valets aren’t actually licensed.”

“I had Cliff verify all of my hires, and that kid is 18 years old and going to Hearst next year. They just look young because we’re a decade older than them. They’re all good kids, Ronica. Try not to scare the crap out of them.”

“I’m still going to need -”

“You’ll get their files before you go home tonight, I promise,” Logan tells her before guiding her onto a bar stool. “Calm down. Relax. Have a beer.”

She huffs, and glares at him as the bartender comes over. “I don’t relax -”

“I’ll take a Blue Bridge Coffee Stout, and it’ll be a Mermaid’s Red for the lady.”

Her glare intensifies. “You’re ordering for me?”

“My bar, my rules,” he answers.

She glances at his menu. “I don’t even know any of these beers.”

“Yeah, that’s another reason why I ordered for you.” He swings around on his stool to face her, and taps her to do the same. “This club, it’s entirely based on serving local products. Local produce, local meat. And local brews. You wouldn’t know any of these unless you were big into beer, or went to bars around here. I assumed both weren’t true.”

“Mermaid’s Red, though, Logan?”

“Mermaids are sirens.” He glances down as the beer is deposited in front of them. “Thanks. Anyway, I think it’s fitting for you.”

“Thanks.” She says it quietly, isn’t even sure if he hears her. But he stiffens slightly, and nods as he turns back to the bar and picks up his glass.

“Weevil said something,” Logan says, talking out of the side of his mouth, “about you coming because I needed you.”

“Yeah,” she flushes. “And?”

“I’m just wondering when you thought I didn’t need you.” He turns and looks at her again, straight on, and she holds in the gasp that bubbles up when she meets his eyes. 

She turns away so she doesn’t have to deal with it, with him and his eyes, hunches over her beer and tells him, “You never needed me. Not really. Every so often you needed me for what I can do. And then you’d go back to not liking what I can do and how I did it.”

“That’s self-pitying bullshit, right there,” he tells her, and she sniffs in some of the head of her beer in amusement.

“You always were a straight shooter, weren’t you, Rex? And it’s not. I don’t pity myself for it. It’s what it is. Or was. If you didn’t have me, you found someone else.”

“If you really believe that,” he tells her with a sincerity she can’t bring herself to doubt, “you’re dumb.”

He’s drinking, but not drunk, and Veronica again stops and stares at the man he’s become.

“Okay.” It comes out begrudgingly, and it doesn’t ease the remaining prick of achiness that has remained throughout the years. The little wiggle at the back of her brain that constantly reminds her she’s never been enough for anyone but her father. It’s stupid and it’s wrong, she knows. That little wiggle doesn’t own her the way it used to, when it throbbed and pulsed against her skin, every second of every day. But it still won’t shut up completely. And Logan feeds it in a way few things do anymore.

The mood between the two of them has turned sullen, and they both take a moment to stare into their beers. He’s miles away now, and she lets herself, for just a moment, wish for the Logan that was always right there, pestering her for her attention. Doing anything he could to get it. She never thought she would miss it, but she does.

“Can I ask you something?” His voice is low, and gravelly, and it hits her where it shouldn’t. In ways he should never be able to do again. She doesn’t trust herself, in this moment, to speak. So she just nods. “Was I - did you ever really love me?”

Bile rises up and hits the back of her tongue as her chest seizes and her face gets hot and prickly. “How can you ask me that?”

“You never said it,” he reminds her. “You never really seemed to want me around. I was, I don’t know, back up.”

“You’re an idiot,” she coughs out, still dizzy from the onslaught of nausea. “I loved you so much - I couldn’t figure out the words to tell you. And I - I’ve missed you, too.” He stares at her, and it’s like her words are on a string and his pulling it taut, because she keeps talking. “I wanted to call you a hundred times. I wanted to tell you when I got into Columbia, and I wanted to tell you when Backup died, and I wanted you there when I graduated Stanford.”

She watches him stare back into his beer, examines the lines on his face that weren’t there the last time she saw him. Thinks about her little wiggle; how Logan might have a couple of his own. He swallows, and she follows his Adam's apple. “Good to know.”

She leans into him, and she’s twelve again, in knee socks. She’s fourteen and wearing a bikini for the first time, hearing his wolf whistle. She’s sixteen and drinking to her virginity. She’s sixteen and leaning on him at Lilly’s funeral. She’s seventeen and watching him smash in her headlights. She’s seventeen and staring at him as he rescues her. She’s nineteen and watching as he fights for her. She’s twenty eight, and he’s those people and more, and she is those people and more too. 

She doesn’t know how to explain Logan to people. She doesn’t know how to explain their relationship, their history, succinctly and well. She’s made Duncan into a funny story, even if it’s only funny to her - “my first boyfriend got so sick of me he and his baby with one of my only friends ran off to an undisclosed location”. But Logan is something else. Not easily defined. There is no one part of him she can parse from all the others. Even Daniel only knows him as an old friend, and just that. She couldn’t explain all the other intricacies of their relationship - adversaries and secrets and missing moms and murders, lovers and fighters and just friends but not really. 

“I hated myself, you know.” It’s the first time she’s told anyone this. And he swings an arm around her shoulders, keeping her present. “I hurt my dad, ruined his chances of getting elected, and he made me dinner; and I hated myself for it. I thought I had my life under control, and that I was under control, and I wasn’t. You were right, that I wasn’t.” She stops, and they sit quietly together for a moment as she fights to regain her composure. “I remember sitting at that table across from him, and thinking about how I kept making all of my friends do really dangerous, illegal, and stupid things for me. That it could hurt them, like it hurt him. I had to leave, before everyone else hated me too.”

“I could have never hated you,” he answers, pressing a ghost of a kiss to the side of her head.

She shrugs. “It felt like you could have. You did once, and I got through it because it wasn’t really me you hated. But this time, it would have been. And I didn’t want that. I was stupid in that I didn’t factor in how you might hate me for leaving, but -”

Logan’s grip on her shoulder tightens. “I didn’t hate you then, either. I wanted to. But I couldn’t. I punched Weevil out for calling you a bitch, which is ironic because I definitely thought it enough times. But I couldn’t hate you.”

“Thanks.” It’s awkward, thanking him for not hating her, but it’s what she has.

He leans further into her, rests some of his weight on her shoulders, and laughs. “You’re welcome.”

“Glad we got that cleared up.” Wipes her eyes, drinks down some of her beer.

“Yeah,” he says. “Imagine if we could have actually talked like this when we were nineteen.”

Veronica laughs. “I don’t think any teenagers talk like that, except maybe Dawson’s Creek teenagers.”

“Hormones,” Logan sagely imparts. “Makes actual communication practically impossible.”

“Truer words never spoken.”

She wonders if it is though, because Logan had always been good at words. She was the problem. It wasn’t hormones. It was just fear. Of losing him. Of losing herself. Of not being listened to, once she did talk.

Hormones aren’t why nineteen year old her was so bad at talking to him. It was everything else.

“So, the investigation.” Logan coughs and looks at her. “How’s that going?”

She swirls the remainder of her beer in her glass. “It’s going. I’m following some leads, you know. Doing the leg work. Trying to piece together Katrina’s last couple of hours, days. And yours.” Intentionally leaves out her visit to the PCHers. 

“Mine? You couldn’t just have asked?”

“I’m asking now,” she answers, and he laughs. 

“A week or so before all this happened,” he tells her, sweeping his arm out across the bar, “Kat had some huge promotion, and we held it at 09ER, and I asked Luke - Haldeman - to come with. You could try seeing if he saw anything.”

“You really think Luke is the key to this whole operation?” she questions incredulously.

He smirks. “No, I don’t think he has anything to do with it. But you wanted to know about Katrina’s last couple of days, and mine, and he was there. So. Get sleuthing. Do what I’m paying you for.”

“You’re paying me?”

“Well,” he amends, “I’m covering food and drink, and transportation. I’d be putting you up, too, if you weren’t already crashing at your dad’s.”

“Shoot.” She snaps her fingers in faux consternation. “If only I’d known that. I’d have gotten myself the swankiest suite in all the land.”

His smirk turns into a real, honest to god smile, and she feels herself flush in a way she hasn’t in a long time. He scoots closer, and she doesn’t move to back away. “That must be why it completely slipped my mind.”

“Yeah,” she breathes. “That’s probably why.”

She lets herself just look at him. For just a couple of seconds. And he just looks back at her. “I should - I should get going. I haven’t really spent a lot of time with my dad yet, and -”

“And he wants to yell at you some more for taking my case in the first place?”

“I think he’s done with that, actually. I told him that I’m a grown woman, and he seemed to somewhat accept it.”

Logan slides closer, and she leans in. “Bribed him with food?”

“You know me too well,” she jokes, but he straightens up instead. Gets serious.

“Yeah, I do,” he whispers, and she jerks back on her stool.

“I have to -”

“Go. Yeah.” He waves his arm, dismissing her. “Be free.”

“You should go too.”

He chuckles. “What? You don’t think a murder suspect should be drowning his sorrows? What kind of world do we live in?”

“One where you’re not going to be suspect for long,” she tells him. “Come on. Let’s get me those files. And then you can walk me to my car. Or, at least to the valet station.”

He looks at her like she remembers him doing, like he’s seeing her for the first time, and nods. Gets up and shrugs his blazer off his shoulders, slides it onto her own. Veronica nestles down inside the fabric, lets herself be surrounded by his smell and his warmth. Just for a little bit. Just until they reach her borrowed car. Just until reality sets all the way in again.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All of my thanks go to Ghostcat, for making this chapter infinitely more readable.

She tracks Luke to the batting cages, and watches him swing the bat a couple hundred times before she gets bored. When the ball machine finally stops spitting out baseballs, she makes her move.

She throws out a, “Hiya, stranger,” as he starts patting around for more change to feed the machine, and he stops cold before turning around. Stands up tall, puts the bat behind his neck, and she watches him watch her as she winds her way over to him. “Don’t you ever get tired playing with yourself?”

He ducks his head a bit, and he looks bashfully at her. She raises an eyebrow at him.

“Veronica Mars,” he finally says as he closes the distance between them, “you’re exactly the same.”

It’s a shallow cut, but one she wants to combat by listing the ways she isn’t: more emotionally available, better at trusting people, less likely to barge forth into potentially dangerous situations. But instead she smiles. 

“Oh, how could I,” she asks him, “when you wrote ‘Don’t ever change’ in my yearbook?”

Luke’s return smile takes her by surprise. As does the impromptu hug. 

“Oh, hello,” she says, gently and awkwardly patting his back. “I didn’t realize we were hugging buddies.”

He takes a step back and smiles more. “Yeah, well, you know, I got out into the world and I realized how much of an awesome person you were. Are.”

“Thank you?” she answers doubtfully, and follows him as he walks them to an enclosed area. He fishes a couple of quarters out of his pocket and slips them into the vending machine, getting a Coke and a Sunkist and hands the Sunkist to her. She takes it silently.

“I mean, you were totally right when you had me sell my Barry Bonds baseball. I made a lot more money off it then than I would have if I’d actually waited for its value to appreciate after he retired.”

“Wow,” she draws out, staring a bit at him.

Yeah,” he nods earnestly at her. “The last one at auction sold for something like two hundred sixty dollars. Steroids, man. They screw everything up.”

“I’m glad I helped you with that,” she tells him, a little confused. “But, the reason why I’m here -”

“It’s about Logan, isn’t it?” Luke asks, dropping into a seat and gesturing for her to do the same. She nods. “He know you’re here, speaking to me?”

Veronica falls into the seat next to him, tapping the lid of her can. “Yeah. He’s the one who pointed me in your direction, actually. I had no idea you two still hung out.”

“We don’t,” Luke says. “Seriously, the amount of times I’ve seen Logan since junior year, I can probably count on my hand. But, uh, he’s always been a cool guy. So, when he called me up and asked me to come out to the club with him and his girlfriend, I said yes.”

“Did you bring your girlfriend?” Luke laughs.

“Nope. I’m pretty single. Have been for a while. I was just there to keep Logan company while Kat did her thing. It was a promotional meet and greet,” he explains.

“And what happened? I mean,” she elaborates, off of Luke’s look, “you seemed like you maybe didn’t want to tell me about that night.”

Luke’s eyes dart around. He licks his lips, and then leans in close to her, his brown eyes shining with the same guilelessness they had in high school. She fights the urge to ruffle his hair, the feeling that he’s still seventeen to her twenty-eight is so strong. 

“I don’t want to get him in trouble,” Luke mumbles, as he continues to watch her.

“That’s the last thing I want. I wouldn’t be here if I thought Logan did it, okay? But you have to tell me everything. The good, the bad, the ugly. Because any little detail could help me figure out who actually did the deed.”

He nods, doesn’t lean back. “So, the thing is, Kat was a little... flirty. I mean, it looked like she was. I only met her the once. And this guy and her, they were talking, and then they left. Went into the back together. And when Kat and the guy came back out, Logan went a little nuts. Left me, started just flipping out. He was yelling at her. And then the guy swung at him, and Logan, he just laid the guy out.”

It’s wrong to get upset when your college boyfriend punches out someone for another girl, Veronica reminds herself, and gestures for Luke to continue. “And then?”

“And then they left. He kind of waved at me, and they were gone. And I didn’t hear anything from him again until he got arrested.”

Luke leans back, so Veronica leans forward, resting her hands on her knees. “What do you think happened?”

If he’s startled to be asked, he doesn’t show it. Of course, he knows how she works. She’d done it for him. “I honestly don’t know. I don’t think Logan did it. He doesn’t have it in him. But I don’t know enough about her to even begin to guess who would.”

“Okay, thanks, Luke.” She gives him a genuine smile, because when she looks back on high school, Luke is one of those people who was just honestly nice, even if he was a bit of a screw up. He smiles back.

“Right. It’s good seeing you, Veronica. I guess we’ll catch up catch up at the reunion.”

“The reunion, yeah. I might not be going to that.”

And Luke once again doesn’t seem surprised, which makes her wonder exactly how predictable she actually is. “Yeah, okay. Well, if you do, I’ll see you there. If you don’t, we should grab a bite some time. Here’s my card.”

“You want to grab a bite. With me.”

When he smiles, crinkles form around his eyes. “Well, yeah. You’re pretty kick ass, Veronica Mars. And I wouldn’t mind hearing about how kickass you’ve been, since high school.”

“Thanks,” she tells him, warmed. “I’ll call you.”

She steps away and looks at the card. Gant Publishing. And turns back. “You work with Casey?”

“Oh, no. Not with Casey. I opened a gym? In town. And after Casey moved Gant Publishing back to Neptune, he needed - wanted - a gym for his employees. He bought me out, moved me into his space, gave me state of the art equipment I couldn’t have even dreamed of buying on my own - at least not without going the route of selling steroids, and I think we both know how I wasn’t going to do that again. So, that’s how I ended up there. Casey’s still Casey, you know. But he’s a good enough guy. Gave my employees benefits that are out of this world.”

She taps the card against her lips, frowning. “Why would Casey move Gant Publishing back to Neptune, after he worked so hard to build the deals to move it to Portland after he graduated?”

Luke’s eyes dart around, and he stands up, motions for her to come closer. “So, uh, this isn’t common knowledge, okay?”

“Okay.” She ignores the sweat he drips on her.

He looks around again, over her head, and she wonders what he’s searching for. “So, there are rumors that Gant Publishing is looking to be bought by Kane Software.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Here’s the thing, though. Those rumors aren’t true.”

“Of course not. Casey’s got one one of the still profitable publishing houses. Why would he want to be bought?”

He smiles. “Well, there would be reasons. But he’s not selling. The bustle in the gym is that Kane Software is looking to break into the tablet business, but they wanted an existing client with the rights to make content available immediately. And that Gant Publishing is looking for a company to develop the hardware and the software for a planned e-reader. So, now that they’re both based in Neptune -”

“It’s so they can work together on this product.”

“Exactly.” Luke nods at her, before he leans in closer. “There’s something else, too, that I just remembered.”

The thrill of the chase envelopes her. “Yeah?”

“Jake Kane was at the club, Logan’s club, that night. The night Logan got into the fight.”

“Jake Kane.” 

“Yeah. I thought it was a little weird, because he’s practically a recluse and because the club isn’t exactly his scene. But yeah, he was there. Him and that bodyguard of his.”

“Clarence Wiedman is still working for Jake Kane?”

“I don’t know his name,” Luke admits. “Just that it was the same guy who was around the house sometimes when we’d all hang out with Duncan there. I remember because he wears that hat.”

“Oh, I know that hat,” she mutters. “Thanks, Luke. We’ll definitely do lunch some time.”

~~~

She boots up her computer in the second bedroom, in her bedroom, and pauses for a moment before letting the case in. Letting it in here, in this room, in this place. It was a vow she made to herself not even 72 hours before, that this case wasn’t going to seep in. Wasn’t going to be a part of her life. Work and work only, she’d decided.

Promise made, she thinks, and broken. She’s done it before, and she’ll do it again. At least this time, it was only to herself. And she’s not all that disappointed by it.

Opens her case files, and starts filling in the new info Luke kindly provided. Casey Gant, as a way in to Kane Software. Jake Kane and Clarence Wiedman. 

Types Clarence’s name into the database, just to see what it pulls up. Nothing of too much interest. A subscription to the Smithsonian Magazine, and she did not see that coming. One lone outstanding parking ticket, currently being contested. And an employment history with the Kanes dating back to her youth. Back to when the Kanes were the shiniest family in Neptune, and she was as in awe of them as anyone else. But not, she notes, through Kane Software.

Head of Security for Kane Software, but not through Kane Software. Which isn’t really a point of entry. Not something she can use, needle him with. Probably something he takes pride in, more than anything else.

Types Jake Kane’s in, sees a listing for a divorce and a pretty sweet monthly alimony payment to Celeste. If she were the type to make friends with her enemy’s enemy, she would pop in for a catch up. Make nice. But Celeste is still Celeste, and there are still roads she won’t travel down until absolutely necessary. And then there are a list of lawsuits starting in mid-2007, spawning from the list of Castle members she gave to Nish. She bites back a smirk. Swallows the pleasure of making Jake’s life hell, because doing so has made her job so much harder.

But still. Job well done, she thinks. Hesitates a moment, and types in Nish’s name. Out of Neptune, no surprise there. Settled in Seattle, and running a woman’s only publishing house. No help at all.

Which leaves Casey Gant. Considers doing a check on him, and then closes her laptop. Grabs her phone. Casey’s number is still in there, and she scrolls to his name and then hovers over it for a few seconds before taking the plunge.

Logan’s face erupts from it instead, the ringtone she assigned to him blaring through the tinny speakers. She hesitates, then swipes.

“Hey,” he starts without waiting for her to say anything, “I’m heading out to dinner and figured you were probably due for a feeding.”

She lets it hang there for a second, expecting a second half of that statement. Logan remains quiet on the other end, though. “Okay, two things - I’m not a baby or a farm animal, so I don’t have ‘feedings’; and I’ve gotten to the point in my life where I eat when I’m hungry.”

“So you don’t want to go to Mama Leone’s for a tray or so of their manicotti?”

She scrunches her nose in the direction of the phone, and asks, “Hey, I love Mama Leone’s, but since when do you voluntarily go to a place with plastic tablecloths and where the waitresses all call you ‘hun’ or ‘sweetie pie’?”

“Since I’m trying to bribe a PI with very low food standards to come out to dinner with me,” he jokingly counters. “But if you don’t want that, we’ll be going to a real Italian restaurant where the tablecloths and napkins are made from actual cloth and where they pronounce the name of the food correctly.”

“And the snobbishness comes through in full force,” she teases. “Either or. You’re right. I could go for some food.”

“You can always go for some food. It’s one of the more comforting constants in the universe,” he tells her, and she grins at him as if he were standing in front of her. “I’ll be pulling up to your apartment in ten. Put on something sexy.”

“Logan. My wardrobe is in New York. What you get is what I fit into my travel bag.”

She can almost hear his shrug. “So wear a shirt as a dress or something. I hear it’s all the rage these days.”

“You hear?”

“Hey, you may still get mistaken for a teenager, but I am almost thirty and have made it a point to know as little about fashion trends as possible.”

“Like you ever did,” she mutters. “I remember some choice outfits of yours that caused some head tilts.”

“Little Miss Butch Boots, it isn’t like you were taking pages out of Teen Vogue.”

She snorts. “I’ll have you know that my look was very ‘in’ those years.”

“Sure you were. I’m going to hang up now, because if I know you at all, you’re standing in your bedroom and not even looking at what you brought that would work best for a dinner date.

She scowls, and then pulls at her suitcase. “Not a date.”

“Veronica,” he sighs out, “A dinner engagement. A dinner between two old friends. A business dinner, if those are still too personal. Trust me, nothing romantic was meant by my characterizing this as a date.”

It stings. It shouldn’t sting at all, but it does; and more than a little. “Sure, nothing romantic, got it. I’ll find something business to wear then. Bye.”

She hangs up, cutting him off before he says anything else. Shakes her head. Shakes it again, and then flexes her jaw before unzipping her suitcase. It’s absurd, reacting this petulantly when she shot it down first. But there it is. She stops, closes her eyes, and breathes. Visualizes the ocean, the waves coming in and going back out. Adds in Wallace, flying one of his planes. And pulls out a light pink wrap dress one of her law school friends insisted she buy, and snags the tight grey blazer she brought to go over it. Make it business casual, instead of just casual. 

And if this particular dress happens to be one that makes her feel slinky and sexy and just a bit out of any particular guy’s league, well, that’s just a perk of limited clothing options.

~~~

Dinner is at one of the fancier dining establishments in Neptune, and not Mama Leone’s. Del Posto, posh and pristine, with fancy plates and fancier patrons. And even though her little wrap dress did get Logan to do a little up-down when he held the car door open for her, it is far from being restaurant appropriate.

“Logan,” she hisses across the table at the tailored-suit-wearing asshole as he peruses the menu, “what were you thinking?”

“That laminated menus didn’t sound all that appetizing after all,” he answers serenely. “Do you feel like having a cabernet sauvignon or a sauvignon blanc with dinner? Never mind, what foods are you looking at?”

“I am severely underdressed for this place,” she seeths, peeved at his exceptional ability to outmaneuver her without seemingly trying, and gripping her butter knife tightly. “I’m not eating here.”

He looks up, and then puts the menu down, earnest and focused on only her. “Veronica. You are the most beautiful woman in the room. Non-romantically stated, of course. Just fact. And the way you’re dressed is more than fine. Just - relax. Let me get you a delicious, exquisitely prepared, dinner and a bottle of incredible wine. And we’ll just talk.”

And even though she wills it not to, the tension slips from her limbs. “I’m just going to have the ravioli.”

“Then we’ll get the white, and I’ll get the sea bass,” he decides. The waiter, as if by magic, appears at that moment, and Veronica gapes at the efficiency of the place as Logan gives their order and he sweeps away again.

“So, law school.” Logan folds his napkin into his lap and she stares at him. “Fun?”

“More like living hell,” she replies. “But I graduated near the top of my class, so there’s that.”

“Any funny stories like there always are for sit-com lawyers, or Cliff?”

She groans. “Not unless you think falling asleep after pulling an all nighter and ending up at Van Cortland Park, missing turning in the paper you were working on, is laughs a plenty.”

“I don’t see how that could be turned into a laugh riot, no,” he throws back. “But there had to be something. You joined a roller derby league or you tried out for a Broadway play. Anything.”

She stops, and shrugs. “Not really. I mostly kept my head down.” Tried to avoid temptation, she doesn’t say. “I was just trying to get through and make as little waves and enemies as possible. You know, trying to be a whole new me.” 

“Hmm…” He hums thoughtfully, quietly. “I always really liked the old you.”

She grins ruefully as she raises her now-filled wine glass to her lips. “Not always.”

“Yes.” It’s the same quiet, solemn tone from before, and it forces her to look him in the eyes. “Always. Even when I didn’t, even when you were driving me crazy, I still was just - in awe of you.”

His smile is gentle, honest, and she recoils from the moment. “Wish I could say the same for you.”

And immediately winces; starts to form the apology for the quip. But because it’s Logan, his smile just slides into a wicked grin. No hurt feelings. No discussions about avoidance tactics. Just the grin, and, “Well, I am and was and always and forever will be a jackass.”

The laugh bubbles out of her throat, and he winks at her as he sips from his own glass. 

“If this goes well, you know, this business-not-friendly-dinner ends with us not wanting to kill each other,” he continues, “you want to maybe have it turn into two friends getting some dessert from Amy’s?”

“I’ll see how it fits into my schedule,” she says as her chestnut ravioli slides in front of her and her wine glass is refilled simultaneously. “I’ll have my people call your people.”

“Well, my people are willing to spring for that too, and they would be incredibly grateful if you would deign to come.”

She rolls her eyes at him, and bites into the pasta. It is sweet and new and old and comforting, all at the same time. Delicious. 

~~~

“I hear Kat ran into someone at that club you and Luke were at together,” she tells him as they walk along the beach, slurping the ends of their cones.

“She didn’t just run into someone. She ran into her ex. The ex,” Logan explains as he shoves the tip into his mouth. Veronica tilts her head at him, and he sighs. “The ex who got away? The one you’d kill yourself to make it work with? Well, he was hers.”  
He pauses, and it’s like he’s trying to figure her out, trying to see if she’s getting what he’s saying. She’s mystified, and he sighs. ““Everyone has that one, right?”

It’s like she’s standing on the edge of a precipice, again, when Logan stares at her like he is. It’s there, it’s right in front of her, and if she could just muster the littlest bit of courage, she could reach out and grab it. She could tell him that she gets it, that she’s his The Ex. But she doesn’t have it in her, when they’re dealing with dead girlfriends. She doesn’t have it in her to trust that he actually feels this way, when everything in her life is going the way she’d planned before he torpedoed everything with his call.

She waits, expecting him, needing him to step forward to do what he always did before. Take the giant leap for her. But instead, he sighs and steps back. It’s a moment she’s losing, and it occurs to her she’s lost so many already.

“And I’m yours?” she forces out, staring at him, begging him to say something.

He beams, and it’s like she’s given him the sun, the moon, all the stars in the sky, and then he swallowed them all. Like she’s given him something no one ever has before. 

“Yeah,” he says, as bashful as she’s ever seen him. “It’s you.”

~~~

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, according to the schedule he diligently sent her, Wallace leaves the office early in order to coach Neptune High’s basketball team. It’s when he would usually be calling her. Or rather, when she would usually be picking up. She’s been avoiding him, she knows, and it’s time to stop. 

She lets herself into the school, skirts by the principal’s office. Resists the urge to leave a note for Clemmons. Neptune High has undergone some renovations in the years since she left. The music room is apparently where the gym used to be; but she prevails when behind the third set of double doors, she finds the gym.

She watches the team jog out in their practice uniforms. Watches them start to run the drills. Watches as Wallace walks in through the side door she failed to notice on her way in, carrying his work bags and glowering a bit as he talks into his phone. When he hangs up, her phone chirps at her side. Voicemail. She meant to wait until practice ended. Waltz up behind him and give him a line. But he’s there, in front of her and in person, and the wall missing him slams into her hard. She can’t stay away a minute longer.

“Wallace!” His head shoots up, and the grin that spreads across his face as he catches sight of her tells her this was the right call. 

She runs at him like they’re not in their late twenties, like she doesn’t look ridiculous, like people aren’t staring, like there aren’t basketball players dodging her on the court and random students and teachers milling around, and tackles him so they collapse in a heap on the floor. He laughs all the way down. He also does more to catch her than to protect any of his belongings, and that warms her down to her very bones. 

“Hey, Vee!” Kisses the side of her head, and pulls her in close. “What is this?”

“Surprise?” she offers weakly from his arms, and he laughs more.

“Yeah, I’d say this is definitely a surprise. I just left you a voicemail, ragging on you for dodging my calls. I guess now I know why. Didn’t want to admit that you’d changed your mind about coming to the reunion.”

“Oh,” she draws out, “no. Still not doing that. I’m sure you know - Logan got arrested. And he called me. Asked for my help. So, I’m back. Yay.”

“I’m a little hurt that my badgering did nothing, but one call from Richie Rich had you hopping on the first flight,” he teases.

“You know me,” she answers from the snuggle of his arms, “Prioritizing murder investigations over fun with people I hate. I’m whimsical like that.”

“Yeah, you are,” he tells her.

She stands up, pulling him up too. And gestures at his buzzed haircut. “I still miss the ‘fro.”

“As I keep telling you, the afro is too radicalized a hairstyle for me to have in an office.”

“And as I keep telling you,” she retorts, “as your lawyer, we could fight that fight.”

“Yeah, I’m good, thanks. The ‘fro makes me look like I’m twelve, anyway.”

Picturing Wallace at twelve gives her a little smirk and a mental note to ask Alicia for evidence to make her teasing more factually correct. Instead of pursuing that conversation any more, she switches gears, asking, “Are you going to be able to make yourself available?”

She watches his face droop, and she battles back the sigh of disappointment. “You know, Vee, I’m thinking - Logan Echolls got arrested days ago. And you’re only just now coming to see me. Only just now asking me for help. What’s up with that?”

“I’m sorry - are you saying you want to help get Logan off?” He snorts. She grins, amused she got the laugh. 

“I spend a lot of my time around 14 to 18 year olds. Boys,” he defends himself. 

She crosses her arms. “So, your humor meter has gotten more juvenile as you’ve aged. Good to know. I think you’ll come to appreciate me more now than you ever did.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Now,” he continues, backing away from her slightly, “I’ve gotta run this practice, and then make a few calls. You know. So I can actually help you, instead of being chained to a desk.”

“Okay.”

“So you’ve got to get.” She stares at him. “Closed gym, Vee. Nobody who isn’t a student or faculty member can be here during practice.” Her jaw drops, and he snickers at her. “I don’t make the rules, but I gotta enforce them. Especially if I’m gonna be breaking them later for you.”

“What do you want me to do in the meantime?”

Wallace shrugs, eyes twinkling. “I don’t know. Harass the principal or something. Just get out of my hair.”

“What little of it remains,” she sings, and he pushes her away from him.

“Be gone!” She pouts at him, but heads toward the door. Turns back when she hears, “And the rest of you, what’re you doing? Just standing around, staring, not dribbling the basketball? You’re supposed to be running drills when I get here. Forty laps around the gym. Now.”

“But Coach -” she hears one of the players start to complain before Wallace cuts him off.

“Do you want to be doing slingshots till midnight? Get running.”

“Geez,” she says to a passing kid, “Coach Fennel is a hard ass.”

The kid stares at her, and then bolts.

“So much for friendly small talk taking up two hours of practice time.”

“I would think, Veronica, that the students here know the dangers of talking to people lurking on campus. There have been enough scandals over the years for reporters to not be unheard of. Perhaps you remember.”

She bites at her lip, and then turns around. Smiles winsomely at the man in the brown suit and slightly scuffed shoes. “Hey, Mr. C. How’s the last decade treated you? Looking good.”

“Why, thank you, Veronica. I’ve been well. There’s been a lot more peace and quiet since your days here.”

“Peace and quiet, huh? In Neptune? Sounds like an oxymoron to me.”

His eyebrows raise, and she coughs. “So, how about I keep you company while waiting on your basketball coach. Seems like he’s been doing a terrific job - eight wins, two losses? Wow. And your defeat of Pan High last year? Memorable.”

“Interesting,” Clemmons tells her as he begins to walk down the hallway and she scoots after him, “I don’t recall seeing you at the game.”

“My father sends me the newspaper articles. Especially the ones particularly enamored with one Mr. Wallace Fennel.”

“Of course.”

“I haven’t really been back to Neptune in… Quite a while. But now that I’ve found you -”

“I found you.”

“Now that you’ve found me,” she corrects, “maybe you could give me some guidance. I’m working on the Echolls case, and I’m thinking that a glance at Logan’s permanent file might be of use. And maybe cross referencing those with some other ones would be helpful, too.”

“No.”

“I don’t even go here anymore. What’s the harm of letting me peruse an old file? Or three dozen?”

“Aside from the fact that allowing a nonfamily, nonfaculty member to see student files is not only against school policy but also illegal, there is the little matter of knowing you. Those students whose files you want either live in Neptune or are coming home in order to go to the reunion. And I cannot in good faith allow you access to information about them you are not supposed to have.”

“So letting me have access to confidential information is perfectly alright when you want to get a job promotion, but when I’m trying to solve a murder, that’s when it’s a step too far.”

She watches Clemmons stiffen, and then sigh. “Veronica, that was out of line.”

And winces in return. “Yeah, sorry Mr. C.”

“Instead of continuing to ask me for something you know I won’t give you, how about you tell me what you’ve been doing with your life?”

Eying his keys, she slips closer. “You know. The usual. Psychology degree from Stanford. Felt like a change of coasts, so I went to Columbia for my law degree. Interned at a couple different places, trying to get a feel for where I’d be most comfortable. Worked at the ACLU one summer. And now, looking forward to taking the bar.”

“Very good, Veronica. I can’t imagine you being anything other than a brilliant lawyer. It seems like the perfect fit for someone of your intelligence and quick thinking.”

“And lax moral code,” she jokes, and then laughs weakly at the grimace that sweeps across Clemmons’ face. He backs away from her a bit, and she winces at her lost opportunity to pickpocket.

“That’s probably a matter of opinion.” He reaches for her shoulder, and clasps it awkwardly. “It was good to see you, Veronica. I should get back to work. I hope you’ll be attending the reunion.”

“Thanks Mr. C. I’m not planning on going.”

“Hmm,” he hums at her, and she stares at him. “Too bad. I’ve found that visiting old haunts, checking out old lockers and such, is always a good way to remind us of where we’ve been. And offer greater clarity on where we’re looking to go.”

“Okay,” she says, mystified. “Stumble into some philosophy books in the time I’ve been away?”

“With Vincent gone, I have found myself with a rather large amount of free time, yes,” he answers. “Learning how to build a life when your children have left the nest can be… challenging. I’m sure your father has had similar trials. And now -”

“Real work. Got it. Thanks.”

“You should wait for Mr. Fennel outside the school. It’s not exactly school procedure to allow non-students to freely wander the halls without escort.”

“You know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were kicking me out.”

“Yes,” he shoots back, “well. Just a bit of friendly advice.”

“Got it. Well, I brought some reading material, so I guess I’ll be out at the tables.”

Clemmons nods, and she walks on, turns the corner; stops, and peeks around. Watches Clemmons look for something and then stare at his keys, and then walk back toward the direction of his office. 

“I guess I will be doing some reading at the tables,” she mutters, disappointment flooding her. “So, if they sound like a weird yoda type guy, it still doesn’t mean they’ll help you. Good to know.”

~~~

“Yo, Veronica!” Wallace calls to her, jogging over to their old table. The table where she set up shop. “What are you looking at?”

She turns her attention back to her computer. “Looking up information on proprietary software for ebook platforms.”

“Okay,” he drawls. “And why are we doing that?”

She turns away from the screen, and then grins at him as he slides in across from her. “Just a weird coincidence. Luke Haldeman -”

“Got bought out by Gant Publishing.” Off her look, he continues, “I do live here, Veronica. I know what’s what. Plus, that had been my gym. Now I gotta use the high school’s, which is just sad.”

She snorts and closes the computer completely, sliding it into its bag and giving Wallace her full attention. “Did you have any problems getting off work?”

He shakes his head. “Nah, I just told them my best friend called needing a favor, like she does.”

“You didn’t.”

“Of course I didn’t!” He laughs. “I just moved some vacation time around, is all.”

She winces. “I bet Janine is going to be thrilled.”

“Yeah, she’s not happy. And she’s not your biggest fan on the best of days.”

“How could that possibly be? I am sunshine on a cloudy day.”

He snorts. “Yeah, that’s part of the problem.”

“I don’t know what I can do to make her hate me less,” she informs him primly, and gamely holds back the fact that nearly every girl he’s ever dated has had a problem with her at one time or another.

“Yeah,” he tells her, and she looks up to catch the amusement pouring out of him, “I know you don’t. That’s why I love you. Because after years and many moves, you’re still a marshmallowy hardass not willing to give one inch to any other woman in my life other than my mother.”

“And Mac,” she corrects. 

“And Mac,” he echoes. “Anyway, it may help your standing with Janine if you didn’t do things like call and pull me away from her during our six month anniversary dinner.”

“First of all, ‘anni’, means ‘year’, Fennel. What, are you still in high school? Oh, wait… I guess you are.” 

He groans. “It means a lot to her, okay? And second of all?” 

“Second - tell me I didn’t.”

“No,” he shoots back, “you did.”

“And you answered? Because at least three fourths of this isn’t my fault.” 

Wallace laughs again, and she flushes. “You said, and I quote, ‘Wallace, I need you’. How was I supposed to know it was just about getting your dad some fancy gift and not something life or death?”

“Because you were all the way across the country, and I haven’t done life and death stuff in nine years. Wait, it’s only been six months with Janine?”

“Yup. Six months, two weeks ago.”

“It feels longer.” It is a testament to their friendship that she doesn’t flinch at Wallace’s glare. She grins at him.

“Not that I’m not thrilled to be working with you,” Wallace says, changing the trajectory of their conversation, “but why not call Mac? Or Daniel?”

“Ugh, because Daniel would have to fly in, whereas you live here,” she starts to explain. “And having him help out at all would mean explaining more things to him than I have, up to this point.”

“You still haven’t told him about your stint as a PI?”

She shrugs. “Teenage escapades are just that. No need to drag up ancient history.”

“Uh huh,” he shoots back knowingly. She just looks at him. He moves on. “And what about Mac?”

“Who’s to say I haven’t already called her?”

“Me, because I did after calling my office and my girlfriend to tell her I was working with you, and she wanted to know why she wasn’t invited to the party.”

“Mac took that job at Kane Software,” she offers, hoping it will double as an answer. 

Wallace nods. “She did, which makes me wonder if you’re mad at her, or -”

“I’m not mad,” she sputters; and, off his look, repeats, “I’m not. I just - I didn’t think to call her when I landed, and I just got some intel about Clarence Wiedman and Jake Kane being around Logan, so it’s better for her if she’s not involved.”

Not pulling her friends into her orbit of destruction. Not forcing them to perform tasks that reverberate through their lives. Not asking them for favors that hurt them. It’s a new and improved Veronica Mars Way, and she wants to tell Wallace that. But it sounds too much like martyrdom, even to her.

“So you’re not asking her for help because you might actually need her help? Smart, Vee.”

“How’s she going to help me? By smuggling a bugged plant into someone’s office? That worked out so well last time, let’s do it again to another woman working there?”

“Sure,” Wallace agrees. “Or, you can be visiting her and then slip off all Veronica Mars style. Do some digging, and then slip back out.”

“And that won’t come back to haunt her at all,” she retorts. Wallace’s brow furrows, and his mouth pulls into a line. 

“You don’t need to save Mac from herself, or from you. Just like you don’t need to be doing that for me, or anyone else. We know the risks.” He shifts closer to her, jaw muscle twitching. “We’re all adults, here, Vee. We can evaluate the situations ourselves, and we can say no to you. And sometimes, we can say yes.” Leans back again, soft and soothing again. “So call Mac. Just hang with her, even if you’re not going to bug her for favors. And then bug her for favors, because you’re Veronica Mars, and that’s who you are. Let her decide what she’s comfortable doing.”

“I’ll call her,” she offers grudgingly. “But I’m not going to ask her for a favor. Unless it’s to get me a beer from the fridge, because it looks like it’s really far away from the couch in those pictures of her new place she sent me.”

“Alright then.” He looks pleased, and then leans forward once more, hands flat on the table. “You know who you should track down if you want the celebrity news about Logan’s girlfriend - Carrie Bishop.”

“Carrie Bishop?” she repeats doubtfully.

He nods. “Yeah. She’s got her own column in the paper. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect from Carrie. A little gossip, a little news, a little analysis. It’s written pretty well, too. Girl never was dumb.”

“So, you’re saying that if I want information on Katrina Bliss, I need to go to Carrie Bishop.”

“I’m saying that’s an avenue to go down. And bonus points for not having to ask your friends for favors. Just a girl you were only this side of friendly with.”

“I’m sure she’d rather eat broken glass than tell me anything,” she responds, standing up and slinging her messenger bag over her shoulder. 

Wallace stands too, and grabs for his briefcase and gym bag. “I doubt it. She may not be your biggest fan, but I think she’d want to help you out if it means getting a murder solved.”

“I’m off to the paper’s offices, then.”

“Of course you are. I’m going to head on home, and see if I can pacify my irate girlfriend.”

She wrinkles her nose, and mutters, “I miss the days when you had a cool girlfriend - you know, someone who got my position in your life. Respected it. And I miss your swinging single days only slightly more than that.”

Wallace grins. “Yeah, those single days were more sad than swinging, so I can’t tell you how sorry I’m not that my love life is finally on track again.” 

“Even when it more than mildly inconveniences me?”

“Yeah, even then. Hey, how have you been getting around town, anyway?”

“A mixture of the kindness of my father and the services of Weevil,” she answers. “I have only a couple more hours with Dad’s car before I have to call upon Mr. Navarro again.”

“If you ever get tired of it, I could be your Guy Friday,” he offers. “You drove me around enough. Might as well return the favor.”

“And this isn’t just a ploy to get where the action is?”

“Hell no. I know you well enough to know I’ll end up there soon enough. Catch ya later, Vee.”

~~~

Carrie Bishop, she thinks as she skirts her way around and then into the unfamiliar but somehow generic office. She imagined a newspaper being more than just nondescript cubicles, but that delusion is pretty well shattered as she peers up and down the little aisles. Carrie Bishop. She catches sight of her quarry near the water cooler, looking as coifed and timelessly pretty as ever. And still the gossip queen, she thinks before walking straight up.

“Veronica Mars,” Carrie shoots out before she has the chance to say anything with a smile. “I figured you’d be back in town.”

“Because of the reunion?” she snips.

Carrie raises one perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “Because of Logan Echolls’ legal troubles. Or was I wrong?” She pauses, exuding confidence in her initial assumption, and drawls mockingly, “Was it the reunion that lured you back?”

“No. You weren’t wrong,” Veronica grinds out before she glances away, takes in the others standing around and avoiding Carrie’s answering smirk. “I guess you expected to see me at some point then, huh?”

Carrie glances at her quizzically. “Why?”

“Because as I hear it, you are now being paid to dish on the latest gossip. And Katrina and Logan were headline makers. Together and apart.”

Her face relaxes, and a bland smile appears. “Well, if that’s what you’re interested in, our papers are sold for one dollar, plus tax, every issue. Sundays are two plus tax. And you can buy columns already run online.”

“Or I can go to the library and read up on it there. I know. And I plan to. But I’m sure there was information that you didn’t put in your column. Things that were too specific, or too libelous. Or just too tawdry for a city paper.”

“Veronica, nothing is too tawdry these days. For anything. Even Frozen had a dick joke in it, if you knew where to look. What I knew, I wrote. And what I wasn’t comfortable writing, I’m not going to be telling.”

The woman turns to walk away, and Veronica reaches for her arm before pulling back and scurrying ahead. 

“Carrie, please. Anything you can give me. I promise, I won’t be doing anything with it except trying to help Logan.”

Carrie glances her way again, mouth drawn. “Are you sure you should be helping him? He wasn’t exactly grade-A boyfriend material to Katrina, and I seem to remember some stories about him being less perfect for you, too.”

“Yes,” she forces out, her voice cracking on the word. “I’m sure.”

“Katrina Bliss, also known as Katherine Boscove,” Carrie starts, and Veronica resists the urge to shoo her along, “she liked to party. There were rumors she was sleeping around, but nothing concrete enough to run with. She would sneak off to this hospital, and no one could figure out what she was doing there, so we didn’t print that either - even though my editor was convinced she was suffering a mental break down or getting prescription pills from some whackadoo doctor. And the space between those two theories is why I never wrote about it. But there is something I knew, as concrete fact, that I never reported.”

She pauses, and Veronica leans closer. “Which was?”

“Katrina was into drugs. Nothing heavy, and nothing life threatening. Mostly marijuana. She bought her supply from a head shop in town.”

“And you didn’t write about it? Why?”

Carrie shrugs. “Well, aside from the fact that it’s marijuana and smoking up is hardly shocking anymore, she didn’t do it all the time. It was always around the times her visits to the hospital would increase. So…”

Marijuana use after hospital visits. The implications are nothing good, and she aches for the 20 year old Katrina was. But she doesn’t share, doesn’t see if her conclusions are shared. Just says, “Involuntary sympathy, Carrie?”

“Ethical reporting, Veronica. It wasn’t something that would be a huge story. But it is something that could shut down a local establishment and get this girl in more trouble than it was worth. So, I used my reporter’s discretion.” She shoots a look Veronica’s way. “I do that, from time to time.”

She shifts uncomfortably under Carrie’s attention, flashes of a night she still can’t remember burbling up from the deep recesses she shoved them into so long ago. “I remember.”

Carrie shifts as well, as if she regrets mentioning it at all. “I’ll get you the address to the shop she bought her weed from. And if you have any more questions after reading my articles, I’ll try to help you out.”

She walks briskly toward a desk and Veronica follows. As she picks up the legal pad, Veronica picks up a frame. Glances down at Susan Knight and Carrie Bishop, hugging on graduation day. “How is Susan these days?”

Carrie stiffens. “She’s doing alright. Here’s the address. And my number. Call me if you need anything.”

“Thanks.” She puts the frame back down, and Carrie reaches over and straightens it, brushes the glass lovingly; the same way she does to Lilly’s face from time to time. “Really, Carrie. I appreciate this.”

For the first time since probably after the Mr. Rook incident, Carrie gives her a genuine smile. “You know what? I’m glad to help. Hope you get your man. And I really hope it’s not Logan, for your sake.”

~~~

She doesn’t get to Grateful Head until the next morning, dropped off by her father. The shop Carrie sent her to is exactly what she expected - Bob Marley flags, Grateful Dead bears, and rows and rows of different tee shirts. Some tie dyed. Some band tee shirts. And a huge Day of the Dead tapestry laying on countless other rugs and wall art.

“Figures,” she mutters, wandering around and rifling through some of the merchandise, dragging her fingers over the bongs on the shelves. Picks up a puka shell necklace, and smiles in spite of herself. Slides it off the rack and makes her way over to the counter. Getting a gift for Logan and maybe getting the proprietor to talk, she thinks - and then stops and stares at the lanky guy flipping through one of the magazines.

“Corny?”

“Whoa, Veronica Mars!” Corny abandons the magazine rack, drops his reading material on to the floor, and swoops in for the hug she’s starting to anticipate getting. “Long time no see. You look great, by the way. Fitter and finer than ever.”

“Thanks,” she replies. “You look - like you. Just like the Corny from high school.”

“Yeah, I figured life was going okay so why change things up too much, you know?” She nods mutely, and he rambles on. “I was thinking about heading to the back to the shop, and maybe mellowing out a bit. You want to partake?”

“I’m sorry,” she answers, “back of the shop?”

“Oh, yeah, you wouldn’t know. I opened up this place a while back. Grateful Head.” He waggles his eyebrows at her. “Because, you know. It’s like a pun. Because Grateful Dead. The Band. And how their fans are called deadheads, but Dead Head would be such a bummer of a name. And Dead Shop - bad for business. Grateful Shop could have worked, I guess, but it’s not really a fun one. So, Grateful Head.”

Amused, she says, "You run the head shop. That's strangely perfect,” as he nods enthusiastically.

“Yeah,” He looks around. “I just thought, why not do something and smoke up?”

“An astute thought,” she tells him warmly, while composing a bitter text message to Carrie in her head for not telling her who’s shop she didn’t want to shut down.

“And, you know, as a side project, I’ve kind of been making a lot of my own merchandise. Like, pottery and bongs. I got into glass blowing. Real trippy stuff, man. And I’m rolling in the mad money from my etsy sales.”

Her smile gets bigger. “That’s awesome, Corny. I’m really happy for you.”

“Yeah, you know, it started off simple - duct tape wallets, some made out of maps. You know the deal. And then I got to thinking, like, I was pretty good at the pottery wheel in high school. And I had the space, so I figured why not just, you know, go for it.” He glances at her hand. “Oh, were you looking to get that?”

“Uh, yeah. Actually. I was. It made me think of Logan,” she offers leadingly, and Corny nods enthusiastically as he heads behind the counter.

“You can come on this side, too, you know. Because you’re you. It’s 22 bucks. I’m waving the tax, because I mean, it’s a bummer.”

“You don’t have to -”

“No, I want to. It’s a little dollar seventy-six present, from me to you.”

“Thanks, Corny.”

“No problemo. And I think I’ve even got a box for it around here. Make it extra special.”

Her smiles softens as she watches him duck under the counter and rifle through piles. “So, you probably saw Logan a lot, huh?”

“Huh? Oh, no. Not really. I saw his girlfriend sometimes. She’d pop in, you know, do her thing while I did mine. But Logan’s been pretty much on the straight and narrow for a couple years now. It gets weird when he comes around.” He wanders back. “Oh, hey, here’s a box.”

She takes it, puts the necklace inside. “Great. But you did see his girlfriend? Katrina?”

“Yeah,” Corny tells her. “I saw her on the regular. She’d buy some of my product. The under the counter, off the books stuff. You know. Cool kid. Really sad about how she - well.”

He becomes somber, and she nods sympathetically. “Yeah. It is. Do you think you could give me any information about Katrina? When she came to you, how she was?”

“Oh, yeah,” Corny says. “I keep extensive records.” Pulls back the beaded curtains obscuring the back of the shop. “Shall we?”

“I guess we shall,” she shoots back. “Hey, I got your place’s address from Carrie Bishop. Weird, right?”

“Not too weird,” Corny shrugs. “Carrie would pop in from time to time. Just to relax and let the time pass.”

“So, you sell to her too?”

“Oh, god no. Not for a long time. Ever since they started doing random drug tests at her work. I could never work some place that did that.”

“Right.”

“I mean, the civil liberties violations alone are enough to make you sick,” he continues, and she stares, surprised. “Right?”

“Yeah, right.” She blinks. “You’re right. Absolutely right. Uh, your records?”

“Oh, right. Here you go,” Corny answers, reaching into a filing cabinet and pulling out a stack of seemingly random papers shoved inside a manilla folder. “That’s everything I have. Notes on how much they bought, how much I charged, whether or not we smoked up here or if they got it to go, the whole deal.”

It’s a lot to even fathom going through, and she bites back a groan. “Okay. Thanks. Can I take this with me?”

“Oh, for you, anything. Just - can you get it back to me like it is? I hate for my system to be messed with.”

Her mouth drops open slightly, and pulls it shut. “Yeah. Totally. Not going to mess up your system. Thanks.”

“Yeah, of course. Hey, if you’re heading out, mind flipping the sign to Out? I’m gonna get started on my journey.”

“I can do that. If I have any questions, can I call you?”

“Dude, yes!” He grins as he flings himself into a bean bag chair. “Just grab one of the business cards off the table. It has the main line here and my cell phone. One of ‘em might be disconnected, because I just can’t remember to pay both bills every month,” he tells her, looking bewildered as to why that could be, “but the other one should work.”

She nods, and waves her goodbyes as she travels to through the curtain and back to a world not filled with reefer madness. Grabs a card off the table, and diligently flips the sign from (Tuned) In to (Peace) Out. Walks through the door into the Neptune sunlight, and pulls out her phone. Cursing herself as she flips through Corny’s incomprehensible notes.

“Hey, Weevs,” she offers as her greeting, “Two things: do you mind picking me up from outside Grateful Head, and if you could Google that it would be great because the address is currently in my dad’s car and Corny doesn’t seem to have put any numbers on his door? And how are your pothead translation skills?”

“I can do that,” Weevil offers gruffly. “And pretty weak, Vee. I stopped smoking up around the time they started really doing the drug testing when you got busted.”

“Geez, mandatory testing has really taken a bite out of Corny’s business,” she mutters, and Weevil sniggers in the background.

“Really? Who else got hit?”

“Carrie Bishop,” she reveals. “And potentially a lot more, if I can figure out what he’s written here.”

“I’ll be by in 15,” he tells her. “Just have to drop my wife back off at work.”

“You’re telling me Mrs. Navarro doesn’t have a sweet ride of her very own?” Veronica shoots out, and Weevil huffs.

“Mrs. Navarro has a very nice ride, thank you. But Mrs. Navarro also enjoys spending time with her husband.”

She smirks. “Well, I’ll let her have her sliver of time with you then.”

“Oh, how generous of you,” He says sarcastically. “I’ll let her know that you’re allowing us this time together. See you in a few.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of things to note:
> 
> Veronica's 'anniversary' joke to Wallace is Ghostcat's brilliance. I bow down to her. If you didn't find it funny, it's probably because I butchered it.
> 
> Corny making glass and ceramics is The Boy's (AKA my husband's) unknowing contribution, because although he thought Movie!Corny selling his wares on etsy was a stroke of genius, he was profoundly disappointed in Rob Thomas for not alluding to Corny's bong making skills as evidenced by the pilot. Without him, Corny would just be owner of a head shop.


End file.
